


The Last Longest Night

by doyouhearthunder



Category: Night In The Woods (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Possession, Post-Canon, Resurrection, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 49,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23269192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doyouhearthunder/pseuds/doyouhearthunder
Summary: Mae Borowski never used to believe in miracles. Certainly not in the good kind. The only strange and inexplicable events she'd experienced had felt more like curses than blessings.But then came the Longest Night when Casey Hartley returned.In an instant, Casey's miraculous reappearance turns Mae's life upside-down. But why has he returned from beyond the grave? And will his resurrection prove to be a blessing or a curse for the people of Possum Springs?
Relationships: Mae Borowski/Casey Hartley
Comments: 67
Kudos: 119





	1. Prologue: And the Universe is Forgetting You

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, all! I'm back on my Maesey bullshit with my longest and most ambitious NITW fic yet! This one is sort of a sequel to my previous fics (especially Last Summer With You), but you don't have to read those first unless you want to; I aim to make this a self-contained tale.
> 
> Enjoy the ride!

**Moments ago, little creatures are pushing you**

**and you are struggling**

**and you are falling now.**

**You are falling through blackness**

**and the blackness is all around you**

**and the blackness is inside you**

**and it is singing to you**

**and you are screaming now.**

**You are wandering**

**alone in the space between the stars**

**and you are being unmade now**

**and you are moments away from the end.**

**You are flying into the air**

**and you are making a tear**

**and the blackness is spitting you up**

**and you are remade now**

**and you are returned.**

**I am watching you, little creature.**

**And I am remembering.**


	2. Something We Can Never Touch

The chill in the air bit straight through sweater and scarf, fur and flesh, nipping at the bone underneath. Mae shivered and wrapped her arms tighter around her, gloved hands pressed under the armpits of her jacket.

She didn’t need to be out here, not when there was a warm fireplace at home and her parents were waiting for her. But it was Longest Night, and that meant it got dark early, which meant plenty of time to stargaze. Besides, her parents had waived her usual curfew tonight for the festival.

She knew it should rankle her that she was 21 and still had a curfew, but after almost dying in the woods the year before, she couldn’t blame her parents for being over-protective – and they didn’t even know the half of what she’d been through. Still, it had been over a year, and there had been no signs of any cultish or even vaguely paranormal activity in Possum Springs since then: No severed arms lying around; no kidnappings; no hyper-realistic lucid-dream nightmares (just plenty of the ordinary kind).

All of which was why Mae felt comfortable enough to come out here by herself at night, following the train tracks out past the woods that hid the mine that she’d almost died in – that Casey _had_ died in – and all the way to the decrepit old pickup truck in the corner of an overgrown field. It had taken her a long time to move past her fear of everything that lurked outside the edges of town, but ever since last summer, she’d taken to coming there from time to time, just to lie in the bed of the truck and pretend that Casey was lying there next to her like in the old days, as though nothing had happened since they’d last seen each other. She’d even cleaned the leaves and dirt out of the truck and set up a little nest of spare blankets and pillows in it. Paradoxically, spending time alone out there helped her feel _less_ alone, which was why she never brought Gregg or Bea with her. This place was just for her and Casey Hartley.

She pulled the blankets tighter around her, fighting the cold. She was glad it hadn’t snowed – at least not yet – or she might have had to give up her secret spot for a while. Summer’s warmth felt like a distant memory, but she wasn’t about to let the chill keep her away. After all, stargazing to search for constellations was a Longest Night tradition, and it wouldn’t be right to leave Casey alone with no one to celebrate with.

Mae pulled an arm free from the warm blanket nest in order to trace the constellations with her finger. It was a crisp, clear night, and the stars shone brightly. She spotted Ibon, the first singer, a goat who drank the ocean to make the fish cry so he could finally hear their voices and teach them to sing. Mae had always found that one a little creepy; she suspected the fish valued having water to breathe more than they did being able to sing. Fish weren’t made for singing anyways, and who was Ibon to try and change their nature?

This train of thought got left behind as her eyes fell upon another set of stars: Lucio the Fox. A sad smile tugged at her mouth; Lucio was Casey’s sign, a fox impaled on a spear. As the story went, “They had to spear him to the ground to keep him down. You know, in general.” She’d always thought that one had been a fitting sign for Casey – he had been indomitable like that – but in light of his death, it had taken on a grim sort of double meaning.

“Look, Casey,” she said softly, pointing up at the constellation. “It’s your sign.” Her arm dropped slowly to her side, and she let out a noise that was part resigned frustration and part choked-up edge-of-a-sob. She’d had over a year now to process this, and it still hurt her more than she had words for. The injustice of it still gripped her heart like a vice whenever she thought about it: Casey Hartley, dead in a dark, deep hole in the Earth, and her, Mae Borowski, alive and alone under the stars. He had died, and she had realized too late just how much she still loved him – how much she had _always_ loved him.

It wasn’t just sorrow, what she felt. It made her _mad_. It made her want to take a baseball bat to the whole world.

“I wish you would give me a sign,” she said out loud to Casey ( _To no one_ , the angry part of her mind snarled at her. _No one is there._ ). “Like a _real_ sign, not just the stars. Let me know you’re listening. I feel closer to you out here, just…not close enough.”

_Never close enough. Never close enough again._

Mae groaned and rolled over onto her side, closing her eyes. She suddenly didn’t feel like looking at the stars anymore. As bright as they were, they were just tiny pinpricks of light in an ocean of blackness, and they couldn’t blaze brightly enough to keep her eyes from being drawn to the dark space between them. Every prick of light was adrift and alone in that emptiness, save for the ones that were part of constellations. They were much like people in that way.

Except that Mae’s constellation was missing a star.

She took a deep, shuddering breath in. Breathed it out again. Eyes still closed. Feeling the sting of the cold evening air in her lungs. It was still early; the festival in town didn’t start for a while yet. Maybe she’d just take a little nap here. It wouldn’t be the first time. And then maybe she’d dream about Casey. Wouldn’t be the first time that happened out here, either.

She lay there curled up in her nest of blankets, letting her thoughts drift undirected. Her mind felt slow and her body was tired, and it was so cozy there, so hard to bring herself to move…

But then she heard something, some loud, intrusive sound, like a bell ringing. She stirred and opened her eyes.

A huge moon hung in the sky directly above her, dark like a lunar eclipse, but transparent; she could see the stars shining through it. She immediately felt a chill run through her that had nothing to do with the temperature; the sight was horribly familiar, but she hadn’t seen a moon like that since…since…

Was she dreaming?

In an instant, all the stars went out. All except for three, shining unnaturally brightly in the middle of that black, translucent moon. Recognition flooded her, the knowledge flaring up from some childhood lesson: It was the constellation Tollmetron, the one-eyed bell that rang at the end of the world.

The bell was ringing now, louder and louder, until it felt like her head was ringing along with it, and the triangular constellation was glowing brighter and brighter, burning her eyes, but she couldn’t close them, couldn’t look away, couldn’t move at all. She was frozen, stuck in place, held down. Helpless. All her blankets were gone; she was exposed to the sky, pinned to the bed of the truck.

And then the world began to tilt, her stomach lurching as everything turned upside down. She was still stuck to the truck bed as though held there magnetically, but now she was looking down instead of up; the vast expanse of the sky, empty save for the stars of Tollmetron and the eclipsed moon, loomed dizzyingly beneath her.

She couldn’t open her mouth to shout, but inside her head she was screaming. _Wake up wake up wake up WAKE UP_.

Gravity left as abruptly as the stars had, and she fell silently away from the Earth, towards that dark, unnatural moon and the white-hot constellation it contained.

With a lurch, she sat up, blinking hard, her heart racing. She was still covered in blankets in the bed of the truck. She was right-side up again. She could move her body. The moon in the sky was a normal, pale half-circle, and all the stars still shone.

She hunched over, removing her wool mittens so she could paw at her eyes, rubbing the sleep away. Just a dream. She’d always had vivid dreams whenever she fell asleep out here. It was nothing to worry about. She was safe. Everything was fine.

When she’d recovered, she checked her watch: 6:44 PM. She hadn’t meant to stay here that late, but it was okay. There was still time to get back into town before the festival started. She would head over there right now, meet up with Gregg and Angus and Bea. Shake herself out of this funk, and have a fun, normal Longest Night.

She had only just hopped down from the bed of the truck when she realized that she wasn’t alone.

There was a figure by the tree line, a black shape among the darkness of the woods along the far side of the field. Someone walking out of the trees…walking straight toward her.

Her stomach lurched and her hand reached instinctively for the knife in her pocket; an old but still-sharp switchblade, a gift from Gregg. She pulled it out and switched it open, pointing it at the approaching figure. Any attempt at intimidation was blunted by the way her hand shook and her voice caught as she shouted, “Hey! Don’t come any closer!”

It was too dark to see the figure clearly, but she could discern their basic outline. They had lanky limbs and pointy ears; a cat like her, around her height, or maybe a little taller. It was hard to tell because they were slumped over, head down, one arm wrapped tightly around their middle, walking slowly with dragging feet as if exhausted.

“I said, stop,” she protested as they neared the truck, but with less frightened conviction in her voice than before; the initial shock and fear was lessening, somewhat recklessly replaced with curiosity. This person didn’t look dangerous. They looked like they needed help.

At the sound of her voice, they raised their head to look at her, slowly, as if half asleep. Mae’s breath caught in her lungs. Even in the colorless gloom of night, she recognized those eyes staring at her, reflecting back starlight and impossible prayers.

“Mae?” The voice was familiar, but hesitant, sleepy and questioning. Then again, stronger, with an odd kind of serene satisfaction, like someone who had just reached the end of a long journey: “Mae.”

She blinked back at that face, dumbstruck. _I must still be dreaming._

“Mae,” Casey Hartley said, standing in front of her, looking dazed and half-dead but impossibly, thrillingly _alive_. His voice sounded inappropriately casual, and about a billion times calmer than she felt, as though there was nothing unusual about his sudden appearance. “Mae, it’s me.”

Mae swallowed hard and gingerly, and tentatively forced the words out. “C-Casey? How…?”

And then she hurled herself forward, running toward him, because yes, she was 90% certain she was dreaming, but for the sake of that 10% of doubt and foolish hope, she needed to be sure. She needed to touch him. She needed to know.

She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, halting her sudden burst of momentum so as not to knock him over, and pulled him into a tight hug. He was solid against her, cold to the touch but tangible, _real_ , and suddenly that 10% of hope started to climb. “Casey, is it really you?” she breathed into the fur on the back of his head. He smelled like dust and dirt and some other musky odor that she couldn’t quite place, but beneath that her nose detected a wisp of his familiar, comforting scent. She’d almost forgotten what he smelled like. “Are you really here?”

He wasn’t hugging her back. His arms hung limply at his sides, and when she pulled away to see what the matter was, she saw confusion on his face, his brow all furrowed. “Mae,” he said slowly. “Where…where am I?”

“You’re –” she started to say, but his eyes suddenly rolled back in his head and his body drooped forward against hers. Passed out in her arms.

The stars shone down on them, Mae Borowski and the limp but breathing form of the boy she loved, alone by the abandoned truck in the empty field, and all she could think was:

_What the fuck just happened?_


	3. Once Haunted

The dream didn’t stop.

Mae could feel the minutes slipping by as she sat on the ground, holding an unconscious Casey in her arms and waiting for one or the other of them to wake up. But the longer she spent in that moment – mind reeling, heart beating heavy in her chest, cold air nipping at her face – the more it dawned on her that all of it was really happening.

Which led to a rather pertinent question: _How_ was this happening?

She had no answers, not even any theories. She would just have to wait for Casey to wake up so she could ask him. Assuming he _did_ wake up. Oh god, what if he didn’t? What if he’d just fallen into, like, some kind of coma? She didn’t know why he _would_ , but then, she didn’t know why he was suddenly back from the dead, either. Surely he hadn’t returned just so she could lose him again. Surely the universe wouldn’t be that cruel. Even to her.

Mae had drawn her share of short straws in life. She’d done bad things as a result. She’d hurt people. She’d been a bad friend at times. She didn’t know what her cosmic karma score was, but she had no particular reason to expect any good luck to come her way.

Even so, she prayed to every power she’d ever held a scrap of belief in to let Casey be okay. _Please, please, please, I’ll never ask for anything again if this one thing can just turn out right._

She stroked the fur of Casey’s head tenderly as she prayed, unable to get over the sight of him. How many times had she longed to see that face again? Now she just longed for him to open his eyes.

He was cold to the touch, as though someone had turned down the thermostat on his body temperature. Should she be worried about that? Was he sick? She should probably get him to a doctor. But how? He was too big to carry, and she couldn’t call an ambulance. She had never resented Possum Springs’ lack of cell service more than in this moment.

She tried to focus her thoughts, calm herself down. Of course Casey was cold – it was winter, it was after dark, and he wasn’t dressed for the weather. He didn’t have a jacket and mittens and a scarf like she did; all he was wearing was a black hooded sweatshirt, jeans and black canvas shoes. Should she give him her winter clothes? But then she’d be the one freezing.

The answer came to her in a flash, so obvious that she wanted to smack herself for not thinking of it sooner. If she couldn’t get him to wake up, she could at least lift him into the bed of the truck and put the blankets over him to keep him warm. She could do that much, if nothing else.

She was about to act on this idea, easing Casey’s head from off her lap and trying to figure out how best to get her arms under his body and lift him, when he stirred and sat up.

Mae nearly fell over from surprise. She felt her spirits soar, hope rocketing her heart into her throat. “Casey! You’re awake!”

“Was I asleep?” he said drowsily. He rubbed at his eyes, then looked at her as though he was just now noticing that she was there. A beat passed with only a thick, heavy silence between them, and then he tilted his head, face screwed up in confusion, lips slightly parted, staring at her. “Where am I?” he asked once more, and for a split-second, Mae was struck with an irrational fear that he was about to pass out again, just like before. But then he continued, “How’d I get here, Mae? And aren’t you supposed to be off at college?”

Mae could only stare back, eyes as wide as saucers, stunned. She felt a sudden urge to laugh and had to fight it down, not wanting to look crazy. It was just too damn much to take in: Casey was supposed to be _dead_ , and here he was asking why she wasn’t at school. _Well, man, I’ll tell you all about it, but give me a day or two to figure out where to even start._

But he was still looking at her, waiting for an answer, so she said simply, “Dropped out.”

She didn’t know whether she loved or hated the look of concern that crossed his face as he said, “Dropped out? Why?”

“Didn’t work out. Hey, look dude, I’d love to catch up, but I think we have more important questions right now.”

He shook himself, as if still clearing out the cobwebs from his head, and stood up. “Right. Uh. I’m confused. First question, I guess: When and where are we?”

“Just east of town. We used to come out here together sometimes, remember?” She pointed at the shadowy bulk of the pickup truck, hoping the familiar object would jog his memory. “As for when…it’s, um, it’s Longest Night.”

The confusion on Casey’s face only deepened at this. “Longest Night? That – that can’t be right. It’s – it’s June…isn’t it?”

Mae didn’t know how to tell him that not only did he have the wrong month, he was probably thinking of the wrong _year_. It was best not to overload him, she decided; let him take in one thing at a time. “Does it feel like a June night to you?” Casey just looked at her blankly, which reminded her of her train of thought from right before he woke up. “Aren’t you cold?”

She saw his eyes wander down from her face, taking in her scarf and jacket, the wool mittens on her hands, her warm winter boots. But he just shook his head and said, “No. No, I’m fine.”

Okay, that was odd. No way were his sweatshirt and jeans sufficient for a night like this one, and yet now that she noticed it, he wasn’t even shivering. And he seemed to have totally brushed off whatever it was – exhaustion, dehydration, or whatever – that had made him faint mere minutes ago. But on the list of things that were strange about all this, that was nowhere near the top, so she let it slide. If he was warm enough, great. One less problem to worry about.

“At least drink some water,” she said, digging through her backpack in the bed of the truck and producing a plastic water bottle.

He gave her a bemused look as she handed it to him, but if he found her fretting over him to be funny, he didn’t say anything. He took the bottle from her hand and put it to his lips, chugging down gulps of water like he had only just realized how thirsty he was.

When he had finished and handed back the empty bottle, she took a deep breath in and asked gingerly, “Casey…what’s the last thing you remember?”

He frowned, staring into the middle distance. “I…I was outside. I was walking. Down the railroad tracks, by the woods. And then – then I was here, and it was nighttime, and I saw you…” He trailed off, and now, for the first time, Mae saw panic growing in his eyes. “Mae, how can it be Longest Night? I can’t have just…lost that much time. What happened to me?”

“You were…” She was about to say “dead,” but the word caught on her tongue, because now that she thought about it, she couldn’t state that as a fact, could she? They’d never known with 100% certainty that Casey had _died_. There hadn’t been a body. They had just assumed. Assumed that whatever had happened to him when those cult fuckers threw him into that hole had been fatal. Being sacrificed to the, what had the robed guy called it – “Black Goat” – hadn’t seemed like something that anyone could walk away from.

But now, her mind racing, Mae wasn’t so certain. In fact, she felt a sudden fountain of guilt welling up inside her for having written off the possibility of Casey’s survival so quickly. What if they had done something, when that cave collapsed and sealed the mine off? What if something had happened to the creature down there in the dark, something that caused the cult’s victims to return? Maybe Casey had only been trapped somewhere. Maybe he wasn’t resurrected, just…set free. But it couldn’t have been anything she and her friends did, could it, because otherwise why would Casey only just now be showing up like this, after over a year?

Mae shook herself, pulling her focus back to Casey’s expectant face and her half-formed sentence. It was a mystery that she couldn’t solve just yet. She’d figure it out later, her and the others.

“You went missing, man. There were posters of you hung up in Towne Centre. No one knew what happened to you. A lot of us thought you’d hopped a train and left, like you always used to talk about doing.” None of which was technically a lie. The whole truth could wait until she had a theory for what was actually happening here…not to mention how well Casey could handle it. It was a hard story to tell without sounding crazy, and whatever had happened to him, if he really didn’t remember any of it, maybe those memories were best left alone. Mae knew enough to not poke his trauma with a stick.

Casey looked freaked out enough already by the gentler half-truth she’d just given him. He hugged his chest tightly, rubbing his upper arms – not from the cold, but as a reflexive gesture of anxiety, one that Mae recognized from private moments they’d shared, those rare occasions when Casey’s confident demeanor would slip a little. That was a secret that Mae knew about Casey Hartley; he only _looked_ like he had all his shit together. Casey was a bundle of worries and anxieties wrapped in cigarettes and ripped jeans and scrapes and bruises from skateboarding mishaps. He’d just mastered the art of making the exterior wrapping loud enough to hide the interior neurosis. Mae had always somewhat resentfully admired Casey’s ability to look un-fucked up. He was all easy affect, and she was all unfortunate accident.

That ability seemed to have fled him along with his memory, however. He sank to the ground, bracing his back against the side of the truck and running his hands through the fur on his head, eyes wide and frightened. When he spoke, his voice shook. “Six months…I don’t remember any of it. How is that possible? Where was I that whole time?”

She knew she shouldn’t try and explain _everything_ right now, but there were some things she couldn’t keep from him, even to protect him. He would find out soon enough, anyway. So she corrected him, softly and without meeting his eyes, “Not six months, Casey. 18 months.”

“ _What?_ ” His voice had a slightly manic edge to it. He looked like he couldn’t decide whether to hold his breath or to hyperventilate.

Nonetheless, she told him what year it was.

He began to produce a panicky whine from somewhere in his throat, and then finally decided to go with hyperventilating.

“Hey, woah, easy, dude!” Mae rushed to kneel by his side, taking his hand in hers and squeezing it tightly. His hand was still cold to the touch. “Deep breaths. Whatever happened to you, it’s okay, you’re here now and – and so am I, and everything’s gonna be fine, okay? We’ll figure it out.”

She was babbling, barely able to hide how rattled she felt herself, and she knew that comforting people was not on her short list of skills. But even so, Casey pulled her into a hug and held her there, pressed firmly (but not uncomfortably, she thought) against the heaving ocean of his chest as long seconds ticked by; it seemed to do him some good, because he eventually slowed his breathing and calmed down again.

When he finally pulled away, he looked a bit more like the composed, ‘tackle life head on’ boy she’d known. He straightened his spine, a momentary shudder running through him. “My family…are they still…?”

“Right where you left them, yeah,” she said kindly. She’d heard from her dad that Mr. Hartley had wanted to move out of Possum Springs when, a year after his son’s disappearance, it had become clear that Casey was likely never coming back. But Casey’s mom had refused; she’d never fully given up hope that her son would return. Mae sympathized with the Hartleys; she could only imagine the strain it would have put on her own parents if that had happened to her instead of Casey. “Maybe they’ll be at the Longest Night festival. It should be starting soon, we can go into town and see if we can find them. And Gregg and Angus and everyone, too. Okay?”

“Gregg…” he said, and there was an odd tone to his voice, something that evoked both recognition and distance, like someone recalling something that happened to them long ago. “I would like to see Gregg, yes.”

“Great,” Mae said. She still felt a little unmoored from reality, like all of this was happening to someone else and she was just along for the ride. Maybe if she left this place, if she took Casey back to town with her, it would start to feel more real. “Let’s go, then.”

Casey just gave her a silent nod. She grabbed her backpack, and without another word, they set off together, Mae Borowski and the not-dead boy, back toward the tiny, unsuspecting town where they were born.


	4. First Night of the Last Winter

They heard the singing before they were even close enough to see the town. Longest Night carols drifted through the air from the town square, sounding like a chorus of angels…or, more likely, the middle school choir’s annual Longest Night performance. Mae had steadfastly refused to join the choir in her middle school days – her life had been embarrassing enough without trying to sing in front of her peers – but she had always attended the choir performances to support Bea. She idly wondered if Bea could still sing like she had as a kid; she’d smoked a lot of cigarettes since then, and Mae hadn’t heard so much as a hum out of her in a long time.

Casey didn’t seem to even notice the singing. He’d barely spoken on the way back, just walking along with a vacant expression, matching her pace. Mae supposed he was still trying to piece together his memories, and she didn’t want to pester him with questions that he probably had no answer to. Maybe later, if memory returned to him in time.

She knew that she ought to just take comfort in his presence at her side, to be content with basking in the joy of this miracle, but something didn’t feel right. It was still all too surreal, and Casey…he was there, but he didn’t feel quite _there_. Sometimes she stole a glance at him as they walked, and his brow was furrowed, eyes dancing with anxious confusion, but other times his eyes looked unfocused, his face slack. Possibly it was just the poor light. Maybe he was just exhausted. Whatever had happened to him, it seemed to have taken some sort of toll. She needed to find his folks, get him home, and then after a good, long sleep, she was sure he would be feeling more like himself.

As they walked into town, she couldn’t help tearing her eyes away from Casey and admiring all the lights. The streets were empty – everyone no doubt converging in Towne Centre for the festivities – but there were colorful lights on every building, framing every window and door. The whole town was alive with light, warm and bright and comforting after the dark, empty expanse of the fields they’d passed as they followed the railroad tracks back towards home.

She nudged Casey with her elbow and said, “Isn’t it pretty?”

He raised his head, blinking, as though he’d been half-asleep. “Huh?”

Mae was unable to keep the concern out of her voice as she gestured at the buildings around them. “The lights. Are you okay, Casey?”

He looked slowly around at the decorations as if noticing them for the first time. “Yeah, I’m fine. They’re, um…they’re beautiful.” Before she could reply, he turned back to her and added, an odd, urgent note to his voice, “Where are the people? Why is no one here?”

“Relax, man, it’s Longest Night, remember? Everyone’s probably at the festival already. Can’t you hear the music?” The singing had stopped a while ago, but there was music pumping through speakers somewhere up ahead, and underneath that, the sound of voices; talking, laughing, shouting to one another.

Casey cocked his head, one pointy ear twitching, as though he was just now noticing the sounds as well.

Mae couldn’t help but make a worried face. “You sure you’re okay, Casey? You’re acting weird.”

“Am I?” His voice sounded strangely stiff. “I’m sorry, Mae. I am feeling a little…disoriented.”

“You’re a bit out of it. It’s okay, I get it,” she said, even though she definitely _didn’t_ ‘get it.’ She reminded herself that she had no idea what he’d been through. She should probably be thankful that he was holding up as well as he was, and not, say, curled up in the fetal position babbling nonsense. That was about all _she_ had felt like doing for days after encountering Black Goat, and that had just been a brief run-in, not…whatever had happened to Casey.

She stiffened as a shudder ran down her spine. _Let’s not think about that right now_ , she told herself, and forced her feet to keep walking. “Come on, let’s see who we can find.”

She marched onward down the town’s main street, Casey following quietly behind her. She had the brief, irrational thought that she’d find Gregg at the Snack Falcon (that the place was still in business, and that he still worked there, was a testament both to his commitment to the Bright Harbor plan and to the enduring demand for junk food), but of course it had closed early for the holiday. The same went for every other business they passed, and Mae had the grim thought that if you simply replaced the “Closed” signs on the doors with “For Lease” signs in the windows, you’d have a vision of the town’s potential future. _Possum Springs: Where economies go to die._

Then again, it appeared that the things that died in this town didn’t always stay dead. There was comfort in that, maybe, but Mae would rather avoid the dying part in the first place.

She was snapped out of her thoughts by the sudden presence of people; what looked like half the town, all milling about up ahead. Speakers pulsed out jazzy covers of classic Longest Night songs; the streetlamps were wrapped in tinsel and hung with wreaths; strings of lights encircled the town square, and in the center, a large decorated tree stood proudly. Around the tree, several people were dancing. Scattered groups of teens huddled together, their voices raised as they laughed and chattered away excitedly. Long tables of cookies and other treats had been laid out for people to eat from, drawing a small crowd. It was a festive, cheery scene; townsfolk who didn’t have much coming together to celebrate what they did have. No doubt it would have felt familiar and comforting to Mae on any other year, under any other circumstances.

Right now, the normalcy of it all just made everything else about the night feel more dreamlike.

The crowd wasn’t that big, really, but Mae had the paranoid feeling that if she lost sight of Casey in it, he would vanish, and she would never find him again. So she reached out to the boy beside her and took his hand. Even through her mittens, she could feel how cold it was.

They pushed forward, making their way through the throng. With all the people there, all of them bundled up against the cold, no one took any immediate notice of two more figures in the crowd. But Mae was scanning the faces around them intently, looking for someone she knew – or someone who knew Casey. She didn’t really know what to do with the miracle boy by her side; she just knew she needed someone else to confirm that he was really there, that she hadn’t lost her mind.

She heard him before she saw him – even in a crowd of voices, Gregg’s yapping laughter carried over the rest. Mae followed the sound with her eyes to where he stood by the food table, Angus and Bea facing him. For a moment she stood there, watching their conversation from a distance. Gregg appeared to be on the verge of stuffing his face full of sugar cookies.

“Guess how many of these I can eat in one bite!!”

Angus gently took the cookies from Gregg’s hands. “Bug, those are for everyone. And you’ve already had five.”

“Five is nothing, Angus. Five is an appetizer.”

“The last thing you need right now is more sugar,” Bea drawled. She’d long-since mastered the art of speaking both clearly and scathingly through a fake cigarette held firmly between her teeth; she had quit smoking last year but would likely never quit cigarettes as an accessory.

“Bea, Bea, Bea,” Gregg rambled, shaking his head from side to side. “I will. Always. Need. More sugar.”

“And here I thought you got enough sugar intake from Harfest to last you all year.”

“Harfest candy is good and all,” Gregg said, plucking a cupcake from the table at random and shoving it in his mouth. “But I wait all year for Longest Night cookies!”

“You’re gonna gain weight stuffing your face like that,” Bea observed.

“Angus likes me with some chub on me. Ain’t that right, Cap’n?”

Angus pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose a bit and said solemnly, “There’s nothing wrong with a little body fat, Bea. It’s healthy.”

Bea glanced away, looking a little chastened. “Yeah, I know that. I just meant…all he ever eats is junk food.”

“Not true,” Angus retorted. “I cook healthy meals for Gregg all the time.”

“And I eat ‘em, ‘cause Cap’n Angus is the best chef in Possum Springs,” Gregg said, grinning. “It’s nice of you to be concerned about my health, Bea, but nothing is gonna make me change my ways. I’m a creature of habit, and my habit is snacks.”

Mae gathered herself, letting out the breath she had barely even noticed she was holding in. Her friends were so at ease, laughing and joking, surrounded by their community, and here she was, about to drop a bombshell on them. What was she thinking? She couldn’t do it. Not like this, here in public with everyone watching. It would be a mistake to make a spectacle of their reunion.

She turned to Casey. He was staring at the others, his face blank and unreadable. But he blinked and turned his eyes toward her when she looked at him.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I…I don’t see my family anywhere,” he said quietly. “But over there…” He nodded with his chin at their friends. “You said it’s been like a year and a half, but they look the same as before.” He frowned and added, “Except I don’t remember Beatrice Santello hanging out with Gregg and Angus.”

“Lot’s changed,” Mae said. “And a lot else hasn’t. We should talk to them, but, uh…not here.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t want to cause a scene. I probably shouldn’t even have brought you here with everyone out tonight. I mean, what if someone recognizes you? You’re supposed to be –”

Casey arched an eyebrow. “Missing?”

Mae swallowed and said quietly, “Yeah. I mean, we’ll get you to your parents, I promise. I just don’t think we should let the whole town know yet. You know how gossip spreads around here. Let’s just…break the news slowly.”

Casey chewed his lip for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, Mae. Whatever you think is best. What do you want to do, then?”

Mae thought about it briefly. Where could she take Casey where she, Bea, Gregg and Angus could talk to him undisturbed? A few locations came to mind – Possum Springs was full of secluded nooks and crannies – but only one seemed appropriate.

She took his hand again and marched him away from the crowd. “Come on. Party Barn, now.”

Casey sounded confused. “Party Barn?”

“Well, it’s not really the Party Barn anymore. It was never a barn, and the parties dried up – not much to celebrate around here, I guess, birthdays and Longest Nights aside. We hold band practice there now. The Barn closed shop, and the band moved in.”

“You guys kept the band going? Even without me?”

“Of course we kept the band going, dude. Bea helped. She stepped in while I was away, and after you…after you were gone. She does the drums. On her computer.”

“I thought you stopped being friends with Bea after middle school.”

Mae sniffed and twitched an ear. Already that period of time when she and Bea weren’t speaking felt like a long-distant memory. She had a lot to catch Casey up on. “Like I said, a lot’s changed.”

They reached the Party Barn, and Mae released Casey’s hand in order to devote both of hers to opening the shop’s perennially sticky front door. As she pushed on it, Casey remarked, “Isn’t it locked?”

“I’m sure…” Mae said between pushes, “it was at one point…but the place is empty now…and the piece of shit door…keeps sticking.” She stepped back, panting. “It’s like a natural lock.”

Casey stepped forward. “Let me.” He put his shoulder against the door and gave a single, hardy shove. The door relented and swung open.

Mae stared, feeling both annoyed and weirdly turned on. “How did you do that??”

Casey looked at her, a hint of a smug smile on his lips. “Maybe I’m just stronger than you, Mae.”

She couldn’t decide if she wanted to kiss those lips or punch them. She settled instead for screwing up her face in a pout and muttering, “Yeah, yeah, don’t let it go to your head,” as she pushed past him and into the Barn. _Wish I had upper body strength like that. Or at all._

She flicked on the lights, revealing the raised stage with their band equipment still set up from their last practice.

“Oh man,” Casey said, picking up the bass guitar – Mae’s bass – and holding it like it was a long-lost limb. “This is so weird. I remember playing bass just the other day, but part of me feels like I haven’t done it in years. I guess I kinda haven’t, huh? Wonder if I’m rusty or if I’ve still got the magic touch…” He threw the strap around his shoulder and gave the guitar’s strings a tentative strum. For a second, in that moment, it was as if he’d never left.

“How are you handling this so calmly?” Mae couldn’t help but blurt out.

Casey stopped and looked at her quizzically. “Calm? Man, I am so far from calm right now. Everything is weird as fuck and I don’t know how to cope. But in the past, whenever I felt that way, I would give my guitar a strum, or bang on my old drum set for a while, and that…that always helped, somehow.”

As Mae watched him reacquainting himself with the instrument, she felt a sudden surge of affection. Whatever was happening, however Casey had returned to her, she knew she would risk anything to keep from losing him again.

But she couldn’t keep him all to herself, either. “Look, Casey,” she told him, “just stay here for a minute, okay? I’ll go get Gregg and the others, bring them back here, and we can all figure out what to do from there. All right? I’ll only be gone a moment, I just need you to…just be here when I get back.”

He gave her a serious look. “Yeah, Mae. Of course. I’ll be here.”

It should have been enough, but she wasn’t ready to let him out of her sight just yet. “You promise?”

Casey removed the guitar strap from his shoulder and set the instrument down. He jumped down from the stage and stood in front of her. He put his hands gently on her shoulders and met her eyes; she had to fight her self-conscious urge to break eye contact as he said, “I promise. I’ll wait right here.”

Never let it be said that Casey couldn’t be serious when he wanted to. Hell, he could be more than just serious – he could be downright _intense_. Or maybe he just didn’t realize the effect he had on her when he looked at her like that.

Mae had momentarily forgotten how to breathe, so when she said, “I’ll be right back,” and pulled away from him, it came out as a breathless squeak.

She turned away so that he couldn’t see the embarrassment on her face, and she, in turn, missed whatever expression crossed his. She didn’t look back as she hurried out of the Party Barn, because she knew that if she did, it would only make it harder to leave him alone for even a minute.

If all went well for once, she thought, she would have all the time in the world to look at Casey Hartley.


	5. Interlude: And the Universe is Being Forgotten

**A brief scene, from moments ago:**

**The little creature called Casey Hartley sits on the edge of the stage in the abandoned store, holding his guitar, waiting for the other little creature to return.**

**The lights go out.**

**Not the electric lights in the room. Those stay on, although the old bulbs flicker slightly (they are soon dying).**

**The lights that go out are the lights in Casey Hartley’s eyes. Pitch-black cataracts cloud his entire eyeballs. Not black like the color. Black like the space between the stars.**

**He is blind now. He is seeing things no one else can see. He does not react to this. He does not panic. Something changes inside his brain. He sits there, silently, thinking thoughts that are not his own.**

**Voices reach his ears. Little creatures, coming closer. A door opening.**

**The cataracts in his eyes clear. The neurons of his brain begin to fire normally again. For him it is like waking up from a dream and instantly forgetting that he was ever asleep.**

**This moment passes unobserved and unremembered. Except by me.**


	6. Right Around the Corner

“Come on, Mae, what are we doing here? It’s Longest Night! What could be more important than that? I swear, if you pulled me away from that dessert table just for an emergency band practice or something, I’ll –”

Gregg’s rambling cut off abruptly as they entered the Party Barn. Mae followed his shocked gaze to where Casey sat on the edge of the stage, the bass in his lap. He looked up as they stood there staring at him; Gregg, Angus and Bea with stunned expressions, and Mae just feeling a rush of irrational relief that yes, thank goodness, he was still there.

“You’re back. That was fast.”

“Ca-Casey?” Gregg stammered. His voice sounded small; he could barely get the words out. Mae had never seen him so speechless.

Casey set the instrument aside and slid down off the stage. “Hey, Gregg. I…I guess it’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“No way,” Mae heard Angus murmur next to her. “Gregg, is that really…?”

“Mae,” Bea whispered. “What’s going on?”

But Mae ignored her; her focus was entirely on Gregg. He looked stricken, practically frozen in place, while Casey approached him the way one might approach a wild animal; slowly, arms out by his sides, palms open. “Gregg, it’s me.”

Gregg looked like he’d forgotten how to breathe. “You…it can’t be…you’re dead.”

Casey frowned, and he lowered his hands a little. “Dead? You didn’t…Mae told me I went missing, but I don’t remember…you didn’t really think I was _dead_ , did you?”

“It’s him, Gregg,” Mae jumped in. “I found him…or he found me…out by the train tracks. He has, what’s the word, amnesty.”

“Amnesia, Mae,” Bea said with a note of exasperation.

“Whatever. He doesn’t remember anything. But it’s really him, guys. He’s really back.”

“I missed you, man,” Casey said with a fond smile. “I mean, I remember hanging out with you like it was literally yesterday, but still…c’mere, dude.”

Gregg let out a small strangled noise and lurched forward into Casey’s arms, gripping him in a tight hug just as Mae had done back in the field. Casey returned the hug with equal vigor, holding his friend as Gregg succumbed to joyful, overwhelmed tears.

Mae found herself smiling uncontrollably as she watched their embrace. In the past 18 months she had, more frequently than she cared to admit, replayed the events in the mine in her head; of all the strange, dreamlike horror she had experienced that night, nothing had imprinted itself quite so indelibly on her memory as the sound of anguish in Gregg’s voice when he had shouted at the cultists, accusing them of killing Casey. But now that memory had been defanged. Now it would always come with the knowledge of this happy ending.

“Well, holy fucking shit,” Angus said out loud, and that almost made Mae burst out laughing. She pushed the impulse down, recognizing how inappropriate it would be, but still: You knew something was a monumental moment when it made even Angus swear like that.

Bea leaned in towards Mae and said under her breath, “So you just…found him? Just wandering around outside at night, all alone?”

“Yeah, basically,” she whispered back. “I kinda fell asleep out there, and I had a really vivid dream, and then when I woke up, there he was.”

Bea gave her a scrutinizing look. “Dreams again? Mae, the last time you –”

“No,” Mae cut her off. “Nuh-uh. No way. This isn’t some weird shit like last time, okay? I feel fine. It was just one dream, and this…” She gestured toward Casey and Gregg. “Whatever caused this, it’s a good thing.”

“But we don’t know _why_ this is happening. And why now?”

“Who cares? Let’s just take a moment to enjoy having Casey back, we can figure out the whys later.”

“All I’m saying is, until we know more, I just think we should be careful –”

“Just let me have this!” Mae shouted, her voice rising suddenly along with her temper. “Oh my god, Bea, just let me have this, just let it be okay, I get this…this fucking _miracle_ and your first thought is to – to question it? What kind of friend are you?”

Bea looked stricken, like she had just been slapped, and Mae felt an all-too-familiar sinking sensation in her stomach as her anger drained out of her as quickly as it had come, leaving behind a thick residue of regret. She could sense the others’ stares drilling into the back of her head. Her face felt hot with shame, and she felt almost like crying; an absurd impulse, considering she wasn’t the one being yelled at here. “Bea…I-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean –”

Bea pulled herself together and cut her off with a brusque, “Forget it, Mae. It’s fine.”

It wasn’t, and Mae knew it, but she didn’t know what to say next, so she held her tongue. _I fucked up again. Every time. I’m a horrible friend._

The worst, most shameful part was that she wasn’t half as embarrassed about hurting Bea’s feelings as she was from knowing that Casey saw her do it.

She couldn’t look at either of them as Casey strode up to Bea, diplomatically injecting himself into the situation. He gave Bea a cordial nod. “Santello.”

She gave him a cool, measured look in return. “Hartley.”

“I understand this has gotta be weird for you, ‘cause it’s pretty fucking weird for me, too, but…it’s good to see you.” He looked around the room, from Bea to Mae to where Gregg stood with Angus’ arm around his shoulders. “All of you. I’m sorry for – for whatever I put you through by…not being here.”

Angus cleared his throat politely. “Casey, it’s – it’s good to see you too, but I don’t understand. If you were alive all this time, then where were you? Do you remember anything?”

Casey hesitated. “I…no. No, it’s all just, like, empty. I just found myself in the woods outside of town, and it was like – like I had been asleep. I don’t remember what happened…”

“Maybe you’re not trying hard enough,” Bea said, none too kindly.

“Bea,” Gregg interjected, “I don’t think that’s –”

“Quiet, Gregg,” Bea hushed him. Mae could see Gregg’s face twist in resentment. “I want to see what Casey can remember if he really puts his mind to it.”

Mae’s temper rose again. What was Bea playing at? She knew as well as the rest of them what kind of horrible memories Casey was repressing. Was she _trying_ to traumatize him by making him relive that? Mae wanted to speak up, but she’d done enough damage already.

So she was relieved when Angus did it for her. “Casey,” he said gently, “it’s okay if you can’t remember right now. You don’t have to push yourself…”

“No, it’s all right,” Casey said. “I’ll try. I want to know, too.”

Mae had the strong urge to stop him, to tell him he was lucky not to remember, but she couldn’t do that without having to explain what she knew. And what if telling him about it would bring those memories back anyways? She didn’t know how to spare him that pain.

Casey sat down on the edge of the stage and closed his eyes, his brow furrowed in concentration. “The last thing I remember is walking along the train tracks. It wasn’t far from where I…woke up tonight. I think. It’s all a bit scrambled. But I remember I was alone. I was just, you know, taking a walk, working on some song lyrics in my head. I do that sometimes, when I want room to think.

“It was getting dark, but it was a warm night, middle of June, so I didn’t much care. I was enjoying the solitude, there was no one else around, and…” He trailed off abruptly, frowning deeper, eyes still closed. “No. No, that’s wrong. There was someone else. There was someone in the trees. I saw them, and I stopped and said hello, like called out to them, you know? I couldn’t see who it was, not clearly. But they didn’t answer me. They…they walked toward me, and…

“I don’t remember.” His voice had taken on a wavering edge to it, like he was scared of something but was trying not to show it. “Something must have happened, but it’s all black after that. Just darkness where the memory should be.”

“It’s okay, Casey,” Mae said, trying not to sound over-eager. “You can stop now.”

But he ignored her and bit his lip, squeezing his eyes shut tighter. “No…I don’t think that’s right. The darkness isn’t replacing the memory. It _is_ the memory. I was…flying? No, falling. No, that’s not it, either. I was floating. I was floating, and my eyes were open, but I couldn’t see, it was just black everywhere, in every direction. And – and there was something…there was something else in the dark with me.” He let out a shuddering gasp, the pace of his breathing intensifying, but his eyes stayed shut. When he spoke next, his voice was a terrified whisper, audibly only because the others had gone so silent, hanging on every word. “It was _singing_. Like music in the dark. Inside me. Inside my head! It’s so loud! Make it stop, make it stop, make it _stop_!”

Casey’s mouth opened in a silent scream, and then his eyelids flung open. For a moment, a half-second too short for Mae to be certain of what she was seeing, his eyes looked black and clouded, before they rolled up in his head and he collapsed to the floor, spasming uncontrollably.

“What the _fuck_!” Gregg shouted. “Casey!”

_No. No no no no no no no._

Mae ran to his side, trying to hold him down as his limbs jerked and flailed. He looked like there was an electric current running through him; his mouth was still open, but no sound came out. “Casey! Casey, stop!”

She felt arms wrapping around her and pulling her off him, and she scratched and struggled, until Bea’s voice snapped in her ear, “Mae, quit it! He’s having a seizure! Don’t try and stop him, he’ll just end up hurting himself.”

Mae went limp in Bea’s arms, crying. She didn’t know what to do.

Fortunately, Bea was more composed. “Gregg!” she ordered. “Turn him onto his side. Put your jacket under his head, make sure he’s not slamming it against the floor.” As Gregg hurried to do so, she barked, “Angus, go get help. Find Dr. Hank if you can. If not, find someone with a phone who can call 911. Most seizures go away after a few minutes, but there’s a chance he could need an ambulance.” Angus nodded and rushed out the door.

“Ambulance is gonna take ages to even get here,” Gregg said. His voice was tense, teeth gritted as he focused on gently holding Casey’s head in place. Casey’s mouth was still open, a little puddle of drool forming on the floor beneath it. “Aaaagh, why don’t we have a fucking hospital in this town?!”

Bea turned Mae around to face her, holding her firmly by the shoulders. Through eyes blurry with tears, Mae could see Bea meeting her gaze intently. “Mae. Get it together. Deep breathes. Seizures are scary, but they’re not generally life-threatening. We’ll take care of him. He’s going to be okay.”

“Why is this h-happening to him?” Mae whimpered, trying without much success to slow her breathing. “You don’t understand, I k-know Casey. He doesn’t have ep…epi…” She couldn’t think of the word. “He’s never had a s-seizure before.”

“There are a lot of things happening here that have never happened before,” Bea muttered grimly. “But don’t worry, okay? We’re gonna figure this out.”

Mae didn’t argue, didn’t fight her, even though every part of her mind was screaming with anxious, panicky fear. For the second time that night, she was reduced to praying to some higher power, even though she suspected the only beings that controlled their lives were buried deep beneath their feet. _Please, don’t let anything happen to Casey. Please let him be okay. Please don’t take him away from me. Not again._

Outside in the distance, Mae could still hear the music and laughter of the partying townsfolk, but in that moment her world had shrunk down to just her and Casey. She stayed by his side until the sounds of happy revelry were replaced by the wail of sirens.


	7. People Who Care

It was, with one exception, the longest night of Mae’s life.

Casey stopped spasming after a few minutes, but he didn’t wake up, didn’t return to normal. He just lay there breathing shallowly while Mae knelt by his side, holding his hand. When the ambulance arrived, she and Gregg insisted on riding with him to the hospital. Even after the doctors had checked him out, she refused to leave his side, despite their assurances that he would recover. She knew what they didn’t – that whatever was wrong with Casey wasn’t the result of some ordinary medical condition. He had been fine right up until he started to piece his memories back together. That can’t have been a coincidence. Whatever had happened to him when he was thrown into that pit, it had clearly left scars of some kind.

She remembered how exhausted she used to feel after her recurring dreams, the ones where she’d encountered those…spirits of some kind. She’d woken up wanting nothing more than to go back to bed and sleep for days. Maybe what was happening to Casey now was like that. He wasn’t technically in a coma, but they couldn’t wake him. She tried to tell herself that maybe he was just sleeping off his ordeal; that eventually he would wake up and be good as new.

But they couldn’t wait around for that to happen before deciding what to do next. Once the hospital had verified Casey’s identity, they had phoned his parents, which meant that Mr. and Mrs. Hartley were on their way there, rushing over to see their lost son. And that, in turn, meant Mae and Gregg had to decide how much to tell them.

Their foursome had kept the revelations in the mine to themselves for over a year now, because they had felt that one, they would not be believed, and two, even if they were, the truth of Casey’s fate would have brought his family no comfort. But now, with Casey very much alive – if unconscious in a hospital bed – their calculus had to be a bit different. How much of the truth did the Hartley family deserve?

“We should tell them,” Gregg said. “What if something’s really wrong with him? Something, you know…Black Goaty.”

“Don’t even say that.” Mae was slouched in a plastic chair next to Gregg’s in the hospital room, a pile of half-eaten vending machine snacks littering the table beside them. Her eyes were watching the steady, consistent peaks and valleys of Casey’s heartbeat on the monitor.

“I don’t want it to be true any more than you do. I’m just saying. We can’t really rule anything out, dude.”

“No, I mean don’t say that name.”

Even indoors under the electric glow of florescent lighting, the invocation of that…thing from the mine sent shivers down Mae’s back. Gregg didn’t understand. That was the one thing from that night that she’d kept from the others. Her own little secret. They didn’t know that she had seen it, face-to-darkness. That she had conversed with it – well, mostly just monologued at it; the entity had tried to speak to her, but she couldn’t understand its language. Nonetheless, she had the feeling that if she hadn’t interrupted – if she had let it whisper in her mind long enough – she would not only have understood its speech but _listened_ to it. Who knows, maybe she would have even ended up striking unholy bargains and killing for the promise of prosperity, just like those doomed murderers they left buried behind them when the mine caved in.

“Look,” she told Gregg now, “it doesn’t do any good to tell them. They’d just assume we were making things up. Who’s going to believe the crazy girl and the troublemaker punk?”

“I resent that. You are _not_ crazy, and I haven’t made an unreasonable amount of trouble in years. Besides, we’d have Angus and Bea backing us up, and they are both highly trustworthy and respectable members of the community.”

“Yeah, that’s another thing,” Mae added, undeterred. “You and I can’t speak for all four of us. We should run it by Bea and Angus before making a decision like that.”

“They aren’t _here_ , though,” Gregg said. There hadn’t been room in the ambulance for all four of them, but Mae and Gregg had promised to use the hospital phone to call with any updates. “And the Hartleys are gonna be here any minute, and they’re gonna have questions.”

“Okay,” Mae said. “How’s this? We don’t tell his folks yet, but we tell Casey everything when he wakes up and –”

“ _If_ he wakes up.”

Mae glared daggers at him. “ _When_ he wakes up, which the doctors said he will, we tell him everything, and let _him_ decide if his family should know what happened. I mean, they’re his family, not ours. It should be his call.”

“Fine,” Gregg agreed. “I guess that’s only fair. Poor guy, though. How the fuck are we going to tell him?”

“We’ll start at the beginning, I guess,” Mae said. “Heard that’s a good place to start stuff.”

“It’s the ending I’m worried about. I know you want a happy ending here, and so do I! But I can’t shake the feeling that something’s…starting. Something bad.”

“How could Casey coming back possibly be bad?”

“I don’t know, Mae. I just know I’d feel a lot better if we knew what happened to him, and that there isn’t any…I dunno, permanent damage, I guess.”

That was a sobering thought, enough so that Mae had no retort for it. She lapsed into silence, staring at the unconscious boy in the hospital bed. He looked so vulnerable asleep, so fragile in his thin hospital gown; so far from the mental image she held of Casey as a scrappy, rough-and-tumble skater kid with a wild streak. She wanted that old Casey back. She wanted her old _self_ back, before her brain broke, before she dropped out of school, before she’d learned that there are horrors in the dark caverns of the Earth. She wanted to turn back the clock, to be a kid again and to enjoy every moment of all the innocent, happy years she’d once taken for granted.

But if she couldn’t have that, she at least wanted a chance to have happy years in the future, with Casey by her side.

Not much later, Casey’s parents arrived. Though it was late at night by now, and the call from the hospital had woken them up, they had pulled on their clothes and made the drive to the neighboring county in record time. It wasn’t the family reunion Mae had wished for, what with Casey being unconscious for it, but the Hartleys’ overjoyed reactions to the sight of their son were so genuinely moving that when Mae and Gregg looked at each other, self-consciously averting their eyes, she almost laughed to find that they were both crying.

As expected, once they’d had a moment to collect themselves and wipe away the tears, Mr. and Mrs. Hartley had a lot of questions. Mae did the talking, telling them about how Casey had found her earlier that night; about how he had passed out almost immediately afterwards; about how they’d gone back into town once he’d awoken and found their friends; about the sudden seizure. None of what she told them was a lie – she just left out a lot of context. She felt a bit guilty about withholding the whole story – the Hartleys had been like a second family to her back when she and Casey were younger, and she didn’t like keeping secrets from them about their own son – but she knew it was for the best. There was only so much they could take in at one time. Some knowledge was nothing but a burden.

Even without the full story, even in this truncated version where she hadn’t really done anything except happen to be there when Casey showed up, the outpouring of love and gratitude that the Hartleys expressed for her was overwhelming. She hadn’t talked to them in what felt like ages, but there in that room, crowded around Casey’s bed while his mom led them in a prayer, Mae felt like part of the family again.

Which made her remember, in a sudden shock, that she’d forgotten all about her own parents. She’d been so focused on everything happening with Casey that her curfew had completely left her mind. She hadn’t seen them at the festival, either. Had they been staying up waiting for her to get home? Were they furious at her, or just worried sick? What time was it, anyway?

She stood up abruptly, scrambling to her feet. “I have to go. I mean, not _go_ go, but I have to call my parents. I was supposed to be home by 10. Oh geez, they’re probably freaking out right now.”

She politely ducked out of the room and went down the hall to use the phone. It was already in use by a spindly, frail old woman who Mae was too polite to hurry. After a long, fidgety wait, she finally called her house. Her hands were practically shaking as she dialed the number. What if they were upset? What if they told her to come home right away? What if they grounded her? She couldn’t handle that; she needed to stay put, to be there when Casey woke up.

She listened to the phone ring for several interminable seconds, until there was a click and her father’s sleepy voice said, “Hello?”

“Dad! Dad, hi, it’s me, it’s Mae. I’m okay, I’m sorry if you were worried, I should have called sooner, but there’s been so much happening. I’m at the hospital. I’m not hurt, though! I just mean…I’m here with Gregg, we had to take…a friend to the hospital, I got to ride in an ambulance, it’s not as much fun as you’d think. Shit, I’m rambling, sorry, this is hard to explain, but, well, it’s been the weirdest night and –”

“Mae!” her dad interrupted. “Calm down, kitten. We know all about it. Bea came by the house and told us the whole story.”

“Sh-she did?” Mae’s thoughts, which she had just managed to pull together, scattered like a triangle of billiard balls broken up by the first shot of the game. She hadn’t asked Bea to do that for her, had she? “Then you know about…about…”

“About Casey Hartley being back? Yes, and we think that’s wonderful news, Mae, and of course you did the right thing going with him to the hospital. I wish you had thought to call earlier, but we’re glad that Gregg is with you.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Hartley are here, too,” she hurried to tell him. “We’re all here together. It’s nice.”

“Oh, that’s good to hear. Give them our best, would you? We would come ourselves, but your mother has work at the church in the morning, and the drive is kind of far, isn’t it? And frankly, it sounds like the poor boy has all the visitors he can handle.”

“He hasn’t woken up yet, Dad. He doesn’t care how many visitors he has.”

Her father went quiet for a moment. “Oh. Oh, Mae, this must be hard for you.”

She already knew all too well how hard it was, but hearing her father acknowledge that out loud made it feel somehow more real than it had before. She sniffed and swallowed, keeping her composure, and said, “Dad…is it okay if I stay here tonight? I want to be here in case Casey wakes up. I don’t want him to wake up and not know where I am.”

“Oh, sweetie, of course that’s okay. Just call me in the morning, all right? Let me know how things are, and if you need me to come pick you up.”

“One of the Hartleys can give me a ride back. Or Bea can come do it. I don’t want to inconvenience you. You have work and stuff.”

“Mae, darling, it’s not an inconvenience. Being there if you need me _is_ my work. My number one job is being your father. And it’s the best job in the world!”

“The pay is shit, though,” Mae said, and they both laughed at that. By the time the laughter had subsided, Mae was both feeling better than she had in hours and feeling the effect of every lost hour of sleep.

“I gotta go, Dad, I’m this close to falling asleep on my feet. Love you. Thanks for being so awesome.”

“Love you too, kitten. And I’m proud of you. I’ll be praying for your friend.”

“Thanks. G’night, Dad.”

“Good night, Mae.”

She hung up the phone and turned to go, rubbing tears and exhaustion from her eyes. When she returned to Casey’s room, she found his own father sitting by the bed, holding his hand. Gregg had nodded off in a chair by the wall, his head slumped forward.

“My wife’s just in the washroom freshening up,” Mr. Hartley said when she entered, answering Mae’s unspoken question.

 _No one says washroom anymore_ , Mae’s sleep-deprived brain harped, but this seemed pointless to say out loud. “Are you staying here tonight?”

“We decided to find a motel. We want to stay close by, but the doctors said it’s unlikely he’s going to wake up tonight, and it’s very late and we’re all rather exhausted. You look pretty wiped out yourself. We can get a room for you and Gregg, if you want to come with us?”

Mae glanced at Gregg, snoring softly. “I think we’re going to just stay put. I can sleep anywhere. And someone’s got to stay with him, just in case.”

“All right, then. I know we’ll sleep easier knowing that his friends are watching out for him.” He stood and reached down and gave her shoulder a friendly squeeze. “Thank you, Mae. Call me if there’s any change in his condition?”

“Of course,” Mae agreed. He told her his phone number and she wrote it down, and then with one parting look at his sleeping son, he went to find his wife.

Mae tip-toed over to Gregg and took the chair next to him. She gently laid her head on his bony shoulder and closed her eyes. Gregg may not have made the most comfortable pillow, but his steady breathing and the rise and fall of his chest comforted her more than anything else in the world could have. Even with the confused and worried thoughts bouncing around in her rattled head, it wasn’t long before she succumbed to exhaustion, and her dreams took hold of her.

She dreamed of a dark and endless desert of black sand, beneath a sky without stars. She wandered there, without purpose or direction, for a length of time that felt both instant and eternal.

When she opened her eyes again, Casey was awake.


	8. Proximity Warning

Casey was the first thing Mae’s eyes landed on when she awoke, and as she blinked against the light shining into the room through the blinds, it took her a sleepy half-second to realize that his eyes were open too. Once she did, she jerked herself fully awake and sat up straight in her chair, ignoring the protests of her stiff neck and shoulders. “Casey?”

“Morning, Mae,” he said with a smile. “What did I miss?”

“Oh my god,” Mae spluttered. “How long have you been awake?”

“Little while now. You guys looked so cute fast asleep like that that I didn’t want to wake you.”

Mae had no such compunctions, and she pawed at Gregg beside her until he stirred and batted her hand away.

“G’way, I’m sleeping.”

“Gregg! Wake up! Casey’s awake!”

“Casey’s wha-” Gregg sat up and rubbed his eyes. Casey gave him a little wave; he froze for a second, mouth open, and then with a yelp of joy he rushed over to Casey’s bedside, Mae following close behind. “Casey! Hey, how are you feeling, dude?”

“I feel fine. Honest. Nothing to worry about.”

“Nothing to worry –” Mae said, aghast. She flung her arms in the air dramatically. “Casey, you had a seizure! You didn’t wake up! We had to call an ambulance!”

“Thanks for that, by the way,” Casey said earnestly. “You probably saved my life or something.”

Mae suddenly felt weirdly light-headed. “Aw, shucks, man, it was nothing. Don’t thank me for dooming your parents to a huge hospital bill.”

Casey blinked. “My parents. Were they here?”

“Yeah, dude!” Gregg said cheerily. “They were so happy to see you, I can’t believe you slept through the whole thing.”

“Where are they now?”

“Probably still sleeping,” Mae said. “It was a long night. Let’s get a doctor in here to give you the all-clear, and then we’ll call and tell them the good news.”

“I’ll go get someone,” Gregg said, hopping up. His fur was rumpled and messy, and his eyes were baggy from lack of sleep, but he had an excited spark of joy to him that was fanning his hyperactive flame. He paused by the door, looking back with a grin, and said, “Hey, Casey, man, I never got the chance to say…welcome back to the land of the living.”

**\----**

After the doctors had examined Casey and, finding nothing wrong, discharged him; and after Mae had called both Casey’s parents and her dad to come pick them up; and after teary hugs farewell and promises to check in with each other soon once everyone had gotten some rest; and after a sleepy ride in the backseat of her father’s car with Gregg, Mae found herself back home.

She was surprised to see Bea in the kitchen, sipping a cup of coffee.

“Hey again, Beatrice,” her dad said. “Look who’s back.”

“Hi, Mr. Borowski,” Bea said. She looked at Mae and explained, “Hi, Mae. Your folks said I could wait here this morning for you to get back.”

Mae blinked, too tired to think straight. “What about the Pickaxe?”

“It’s fine. I can not open the store for like, one morning.”

“Casey’s okay, if you were wanting to know.” She was finding it hard to keep her eyes open. It felt like she hadn’t slept last night at all.

“That’s good to hear, but I was more worried about how _you_ were holding up.”

“M’okay, Bea. Just sleepy.”

“You want some coffee, kitten?” her dad suggested.

“Thanks but I think I just need a nap. Didn’t sleep that well at the hospital.”

Bea pushed her chair back and stood up. “Let’s go upstairs. I want to talk to you.”

Mae led Bea up to her attic bedroom, where she gleefully flopped face-first onto her bed. She stretched her arms and rubbed her face against the pillow. “Talk fast, I’m well on my way to passing out here.”

Bea stood there rolling her fake cigarette between her lips for a moment, and then said, “I’m glad Casey’s okay.”

“No thanks to me,” Mae muttered into her pillow. “I was useless, I just froze up like a deer in headlights. You’re the one who knew what to do.” She raised her head and added, “Hey, where’d you learn all that stuff about seizures, anyway?”

“Remember that girl who had a seizure when we were in Scouts?”

“No?”

“Well, you were there. It really freaked me out. I had never seen anything like that before. But I remember after the counselors took care of her, they took the opportunity to teach us about what to do if someone has one. And I guess it stuck with me.”

“Man, I don’t remember that at all.”

Bea snorted sarcastically. “God, I swear, you and Casey are perfect for each other. You both have shitty memories.”

“Hey, that’s not fair,” Mae said, rolling over onto her back. “I have no excuse, true, but it’s not his fault that he has am…amnesia.” She thrust a tired fist into the air. “I got the word right this time!”

“Congrats,” Bea snarked.

“What’s your problem with him, anyway?” Mae asked. “You’re being all…bitter and suspicious and shit. Like more than usual.”

“I’m not…I just think you should be careful.”

“Why? What does that even mean?”

Bea paused for a long moment; long enough that Mae was about to say something to break the silence. But then she looked at Mae and said, “What if this Casey isn’t who you think he is?”

“What?!” Mae threw her arms out above her head, even though she was lying down, and then winced when she hit her fingers on the headboard of her bed. She sat up, rubbing her hand. “That doesn’t even make sense, Bea. Who the hell else would he be? Please don’t go all conspiracy on me. That was me with the ghost hunt shit last year, and you remember how annoying I was.”

“You were also _right_. Well, kind of. Anyway I don’t mean, like, that he’s a different person. I just mean, what if he’s changed? I’m just not sure we should be celebrating yet. Having him just show up like this feels too good to be true.”

“Yeah, good things usually do,” Mae said, growing irritated. “And we get those pretty rarely around here, Bea, so you’ll have to forgive me if I want to believe in this one.”

“But Mae, I can’t even imagine what he’s been through. Whatever happened clearly traumatized him. I mean, he had a seizure as soon as he started even thinking about it! Who knows what kind of psychological damage he has. You can’t assume that he’ll be able to just like, pick up his life where he left off.”

“Why not? He’s still got me, and Gregg, and his family. You didn’t see his parents last night. They were _overjoyed_ to have their son back. Casey deserves this. It was all wrong what happened to him. He deserves to get everything back and get to start over.”

There was a short, tense silence, which Bea broke by saying quietly, “He really means a lot to you, huh?”

“Of course he does. It’s _Casey_. We’ve been friends like, my entire life. Even before Gregg.”

Bea crossed her arms. “And both before and after me, I guess. That whole time in high school when you weren't speaking to me, you were off hanging out with Casey.”

“Don’t be like that. This isn’t about you, Bea.” Mae swung her legs around to sit on the edge of the bed, looking up at Bea with her palms pressed against the mattress. “Or is it? Is that what this is? You’re worried that because Casey’s back, I’m not going to need you anymore? You still think that this” – she gestured back and forth between them with her hand – “is only about, what did you call it…proximity?”

“I didn’t say that!”

“You were thinking it. And it’s bullshit. What, like just because I have Casey again now, suddenly you’re all jealous?”

Bea’s jaw dropped, so much so that her cigarette nearly fell out of her mouth. “That’s so unfair, Mae! You’re putting words in my mouth.”

But Mae could feel her temper rising the more Bea tried to deny it. “Well if it’s not that, then what’s the problem? I don’t get why you can’t just let me have this! Do you think I’d be saying all this paranoid stuff to you if it was your mom who came back instead of Casey?”

Bea gave her a poisonous glare. “Don’t bring my mom into this, you asshole. Don’t do that. This isn’t the same and you know it.”

“Okay, sorry! Geez. Look, you have nothing to worry about. I’m always going to want to be your friend. Just maybe not when you’re being a jealous bitch.”

Bea looked affronted, which gave Mae a mean-spirited feeling of satisfaction. She didn’t like this part of her that took over when she was stressed and worn out and overwhelmed; this angry instinct to lash out and hurt someone before they could hurt her first. But she didn’t know how to turn it off, either, and right now she was just so goddamn sick of Bea’s skepticism. She wished that just once, Bea would trust her and believe her without trying to poke holes in everything.

“I don’t think I’m the one being a bitch here, Mae,” Bea said, holding herself so stiffly and with so much careful composure that Mae could tell she was pissed as hell.

“Whatever. I’m too tired for this. I promise I like you for more than just proximity, Bea, but right now I need you to get out of mine.”

Bea glared at her, but she didn’t argue. She just turned and left, slamming the door behind her.

 _Childish_ , Mae thought as she listened to Bea’s footsteps storming down the stairs. Bea could be jealous all she wanted. She didn’t get it. She didn’t know what it felt like to have something – someone – who made you feel like maybe existence had a point to it after all; like maybe the brief span of time they got to be alive in wouldn’t be all bad. Bea knew what it was like to lose someone she loved, but she definitely didn’t know what it felt like to get that person back when you’d thought they were gone forever.

She wished she could make Bea understand that feeling, because God, it felt incredible. If she could have brought Bea’s mom back to life for her, she would have. Maybe then Bea would get why she needed Casey to be okay so badly.

She flopped back onto her bed, feeling both emotionally drained and like she wanted to go out and break something. Her mood had completely soured. Why did Bea have to be such a buzzkill? Why couldn’t she just be happy about this?

She shut her eyes against the late morning light coming through the window. All she wanted to do was to sleep.

Well…to sleep, and then to see Casey. She let her thoughts drift off the subject of Bea and onto all the things she wanted to say to Casey next time she saw him. So many things that she had no idea how she would ever find the words to say…

She rolled over onto her side, curled up and closed her eyes, her thoughts flowing leisurely and undirected, until sleep took her.

**\----**

Mae wandered once again through that vast desert of endless dark sand dunes. This time, an eclipsed moon hung in the sky above; the three stars of Tollmetron shone through it, as though emerging from inside that darkness, brighter than she’d ever seen them.

She couldn’t remember how she’d gotten here. She didn’t know how long she’d been trudging through the sand. She thought that, perhaps, part of her had always been in this place. Maybe that was why it felt so familiar.

**“Hello, little creature.”**

Mae jumped and spun around. A pair of enormous pale eyes glowed at her, unblinking, from the top of the nearest dune. The body they were attached to was black and almost formless against the similar darkness of the sand and the sky; when she looked at it in her peripheral vision, it seemed to resemble the crouched form of a giant cat, but when she looked at it directly, it was hard to pin down to a specific shape. And yet she knew she had seen it before, in a dream only half-remembered until now.

_Little creatures are coming here, and they are asking me if I am God._

“Oh, no,” she said, backing away. “Nuh-uh, no thank you. We are not doing the whole ‘spooky cryptic dream entity’ thing again. I had enough of that last time, thanks. Whatever you want, Mr. God Cat, I’m not interested.”

 **“I want nothing,”** the cat said. Its voice was not really a voice, but more like a vibration inside Mae’s mind; a smooth, monotone purr. **“And I am already telling you moments ago that I am not your God.”**

“You remember me, then?”

**“Of course, Mae Borowski-creature. I told you I am remembering you. There is no time –”**

“No time to be forgetting, yeah, I remember, too. But I thought you said I wasn’t going to see you again.”

 **“Circumstances are changing. Have changed. There are things I did not foresee that are happening now. There are tears in the sky once again. And things worse than tears.”** The cat inclined its head upward, staring at the empty sky. **“Can you see it? The night sky is in disarray. The moon and the stars are afraid of what is happening. They are hiding their faces now.”**

“That’s fucking ominous. What are you talking about? And why am I here?”

**“I am talking about the little creature you call Casey Hartley. You are here because you are connected to him.”**

Mae felt her blood run cold. Maybe it was just the dream, the weird way that sensations made no sense in it, but she hadn’t been aware of the temperature before. But now it felt as though all the warmth had disappeared from the air. “What _about_ Casey?”

**“He was here, moments ago. Now he is in your world, back where he came from, and he walks and talks and breathes again. It is unnatural.”**

“All of this is fucking unnatural!” Mae said, throwing her arms in the air. “Talking god cats and monsters underground and weird eldritch nightmare shit! The world’s not supposed to be like this!”

**“You are wrong, little creature. All of that is natural. These things you find so strange are always there. They are part of the order of everything. What is not natural is for us to be meeting. What is not natural is for little creatures to be coming and going from here.”**

“I don’t understand,” Mae said, shoving down her frustration. “What does any of that have to do with Casey?”

**“You have met the great beast, have you not? The darkest of all beings, the one your kind calls Black Goat.”**

It was like the air was growing thinner. Mae had to suck in a few deep, heaving breaths before she could calm her body down enough to reply. “…we’ve met, yeah.”

**“The boy was fed to Black Goat. Now he is home again, with you. But the great beast does not return his possessions lightly. This is not just an anomaly. There is meaning to it. Something I have not seen before. And I have seen much.”**

“But we buried Black Goat. We buried it in the mine shaft along with all its creepy cult followers.”

The cat’s ear flicked impatiently. **“You cannot get rid of the beast so easily. You can only feed him or starve him. I am finding tears in the sky again now, and I am knowing that something is amiss. And now dead creatures are returning, and I am watching, and I am wondering.”**

“So what? Can’t you just close the tears or whatever, like you said you’d do last time?”

**“Little creature, the tears are not the problem. The problem is what has passed through them, and why.”**

“What are you saying? You think it’s bad that Casey came back?”

**“I do not know. This is something new, something that goes against the usual balance. There are forces at play that are beyond your understanding, little creature. Perhaps beyond even mine. At least for now.”**

Mae felt her temper flare up again. She was so sick of this weird bullshit. “I don’t care! I don’t care about you or Black Goat or your games. I just want Casey, and I want to be left alone.”

**“There are no games here, Mae-creature. I have nothing to win or lose. But abnormal things are happening around you, and I am trying to understand, and I am warning you now.”**

“I don’t need your warnings. I’m sure Casey will be fine. I won’t let anything happen to him. You don’t even know what’s going on, you said it yourself. And why do you even care, anyway? Didn’t you say all that stuff about how the universe is ending and everything’s going to be forgotten and nothing matters?”

**“It is true. The time of forgetting is closer than you know. But what happens between now and then will matter a great deal. At least for you. There is much yet to be decided, before all has ended.”**

“Well, good luck with that, but I didn’t ask to be brought here, and I didn’t ask to be involved. Just send me back and stay out of my life.”

**“Little creature, I am not bringing or sending you anywhere. You are wandering here, and I am talking to you, but not because I am wanting you to be here. Wander on if you wish.”**

“Okay. Fine. I’m going,” Mae said, as she turned and walked away. She could feel the cat’s eyes on her back; even though she knew it hadn’t moved, she somehow felt uncomfortable not being able to see where it was. It felt like it was all around her.

**“We will be speaking again soon, I think, little creature. I will see you when you next return to this place.”**

“Not if I see you first!” Mae shouted. It was a dumb, nonsensical thing to say, and she felt weirdly embarrassed, but the cat did not reply. A few paces later, she couldn’t resist glancing back over her shoulder.

The cat was gone.

She walked on through the never-ending sand dunes, her feet taking her nowhere, until her brain took her back to the waking world she knew.


	9. Constellations

Mae woke up exhausted. Her body was sore, her eyes bleary with sleep, and her head ached worse than the morning after she’d gotten drunk at that stupid party in the woods and made a fool of herself.

It didn’t matter. None of that mattered, because Casey was back, and she would get to see him today. Er, tonight. What time was it, anyways? It was still light outside her window.

She rolled over with a groan and checked the alarm clock beside her bed. Its glowing green letters read 8:44 AM. But that couldn’t be right, that was _earlier_ than it had been when she got home and went to sleep. Had she really slept for almost 24 hours? It certainly didn’t feel like she had; except for her stomach, which gave a sudden growl as if trying to get her attention.

Mae stretched and yawned, still wanting nothing more than to curl up and keep sleeping. But she sat up anyways, because she’d just realized what was making her stomach growl – an enticing scent reaching her nose from a covered plate of food on her bedside table. The plate had a note on it:

_Mae,  
  
Thought it best not to wake you – you’ve been asleep so long that I can only assume you didn’t sleep a wink when you spent the night at the hospital. Your father and I have work, but I warmed up some leftovers from last night’s dinner for you. Have a good day, sweetie (if you’re awake for any of it!).  
  
– Mom <3_

_PS. Casey called the house last night, but I told him you were still sleeping. He sounded well, though. He said he would try to reach you on that whatever you call it app that you use to chat on the computer._

Mae scrambled out of bed and dove for her laptop so fast that she almost got tangled in the bedsheets. While the computer was booting up, she shoveled the plate of leftovers into her mouth; it was cold, but she was too hungry to care.

As the computer readied itself with a loud hum – she really needed to get that fan replaced before the crappy old thing overheated – it began assailing her with IM notifications. She quickly took stock: Nothing from Bea (and oh shit, she’d forgotten what she’d said to Bea, fuck, she would have to apologize for that somehow), nor from Angus, but dozens of new messages from Gregg.

They read:

_11:44 AM – Hey, Mae.  
11:45 AM – Mae.  
11:45 AM – Maestro.  
11:59 AM – You up yet?  
12:12 PM – Nah, she still sleeping.  
12:13 PM – I couldn’t fucking sleep so I am eating leftover Longest Night cookies.  
12:13 PM – Angus made them.  
12:14 PM – They’re delicious.  
12:15 PM – We should bring some to Casey.  
12:15 PM – Y’know, when we go see him.  
12:15 PM – AFTER YOU WAKE UP.  
12:18 PM – I bet he’ll stop passing out so much if he eats more sugar.  
12:20 PM – We still need to tell him that he died. That’ll be awkward lol.  
12:21 PM – Bea seems pissed at you btw but she won’t say why.  
12:30 PM – MAE WAKE UP.  
12:42 PM – MAAAAE.  
1:11 PM – Angus says I need to take my mind off all this.  
1:11 PM – So we’re gonna go do, y’know, stuff and stuff.  
1:12 PM – Wish me luck not puking I have had so many cookies oh god.  
2:30 PM – Quick update, good times were had, did not puke.  
4:44 PM – MAE YOU SLEEPYHEAD I STG._

And so on and so forth.

Mae only skimmed them, and did not immediately reply, because her attention had been grabbed by the little 1 in the corner of Casey’s IM icon. She was surprised to find herself not wanting to immediately click on it. Instead she just sat there staring at it, feeling a sudden wave of emotion. Between the initial wonder and confusion of Casey’s return, the horrible panicked terror of his seizure and the trip to the hospital, and then the exhaustion of the following morning, she hadn’t really let herself stop and just _feel_ what it meant to have Casey back in her life. How many times in the past year had she looked at that IM icon and yearned to see a new message accompanying it? How many times had she clicked on it and read his away message and just _missed him_ so badly that she wanted to scream?

And now here he was.

After a moment, she clicked on the icon and read the message. Compared to Gregg’s manic tone, it was very simple. It said:

_Mae. I tried to call but your mom said you were sleeping. I’m at home and I’m okay. Everything’s okay now, thanks to you. But do let me know when you see this, please. I just…I want to see you._

Mae read it again, and again, lingering perhaps overly long on the last line. Trying to parse what state of mind he’d been in when he typed it, and what exactly that little “…” was meant to convey.

After a moment, she messaged back: _I’m awake! Finally, lol. I want to see you, too. When and where?_

The message displayed as “read” almost instantly, and Mae felt a lurch of excitement when his little ‘currently typing’ bubble appeared. That was fast; had he just been waiting for her to respond? No way…that was crazy. He was just already online. Just a coincidence, not a sign of anything. She was overthinking this.

The text popped up: _Morning! Can you come to my place? The ‘rents would love to have you over, but I don’t think my family’s going to let me out of their sight for a while, haha._

She texted back: _Sure! Cool if Gregg and Angus come with? Bea can drive us. We all kinda need to talk to you about some stuff._

A moment later: _Okay…? Bit ominous Mae but I’d love to see everyone._

Typing as fast as possible: _aaaah sorry didn’t mean to freak you out! Just gotta catch up, get you up to speed, lots has happened, etc, you know._

_Sure. See you soon then? :)_

_Soon! Promise! Be right there! :D_

Next, Mae turned her attention to Bea’s chat. She drafted and deleted a couple messages before getting fed up and settling on one:

_Bea I am so sorry I was mean and horrid to you I didn’t mean it, you’re a goddess and I love you and also I need your car so we can all go see Casey ASAP. I know I suck and I’m sorry! :0_

While she anxiously awaited a reply, she finally got back to Gregg:

_I’m alive! I promise! Grab Angus bc we are going to see Casey right away. Assuming Bea doesn’t hate me and will drive us._

Gregg’s response as almost as fast as Casey’s: _brb calling in sick to work immediately_.

While Mae was writing a reply, a notification came in from Bea:

_Mae, I can’t drive you anywhere, I’m literally at work right now._

_When do you get off???_

_Like 5 PM._

_omg that’s so loooooooooooooong! :’c_

_That’s because I only just started my shift, Mae. Seeing Casey can’t wait until this evening?_

_Bea pleeeease I have been waiting so long already…_

_UGH fine. You can borrow the car. BUT ONLY if Angus drives._

_YAY Bea you are the best and I don’t deserve you!!! See u @ Pickaxe in 10 for the keys. <3_

She switched back over to Gregg’s chat and shot off: _Meeting at Pickaxe asap! See u there!_

Mae didn’t even wait for a response. A hasty change into clothes she hadn’t been living/sleeping in for days, and she was out the door. The winter morning air was still crisp and chilly, but she barely noticed the cold. She had a spring in her step and a smile for every neighbor she passed on the street. All memory of her dream and her exhaustion upon waking had left her; she was practically jumping up and down with excitement.

About halfway to the Pickaxe, she broke into a run.

**\----**

Mae arrived to find Gregg and Angus already there, chatting with Bea. It looked like a slow day at the Pickaxe, as most days were; Bea was resting her head on her arms on the counter, while Gregg sat next to her, swinging his legs in the air; Angus politely leaned against the counter beside him.

All three of them looked up when Mae burst through the door, out of breath and panting.

“Did you run all the way here?” Bea asked.

“Not…all…the way…” Mae huffed. Geez, when did she get so out of shape? She’d been spending too much time at home these past months and not enough time jumping around on the rooftops.

“If I’d known it was a race I would have hurried,” Gregg snarked, grinning.

“Shut up,” Mae muttered, and hopped up on the counter next to Gregg and lay down, breathing heavily.

“Okay, well, now that you’re all here, you need to leave before Creek gets here for his shift,” Bea said. “The last thing I need is that creep giving me a hard time for socializing on the clock.” She rolled her eyes and produced a set of car keys and handed them to Angus. “Car’s parked round back. Be back by 5 at the latest.”

Angus took the keys and handed her a few bills from his wallet. “For gas money. I’ll fill her up on the way back. And thanks, Bea.”

Bea nodded, and Gregg hopped down from the counter. Mae lingered for a moment, still catching her breath, until Bea gave her shoulders a shove and pushed her off.

Mae landed on her butt with a yelp. Ignoring Gregg’s muffled snort of amusement, she picked herself up off the floor and complained, “Ow! What the hell, Bea?”

Bea looked down at her dispassionately. “Better get going, Mae. Your boyfriend awaits.”

“He’s not my –” Mae sputtered, picking herself up off the floor and rubbing her tailbone. “Whatever. See you around.”

She pushed the door open and stormed out, feeling angry and embarrassed. _Bea’s still pissed off, then. Guess I deserved that, but geez, would it kill her to be nice? I tried to apologize!_

Gregg sprinted a little to catch up with her as they headed around the back of the store. “Dude, what was that all about?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Mae scowled. “We should be thinking about what we’re going to tell Casey.”

“We’ll figure that out on the way,” Gregg said. He turned and shouted to Angus, “Got the keys, Cap’n?”

Angus gave them a twirl on his finger and unlocked the car doors. “Next stop, the happy Hartley home.”


	10. Here's to Survival

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've got the rest of the fic mapped out, and it has turned out to be a lengthier project than I anticipated. I'll be posting updates twice a week on Thursdays and Sundays from now on until it's finished. Thanks so much to everyone following this story!

Casey’s family lived a little ways removed from Possum Springs’ main neighborhoods, up to the northeast of town where the more rural houses were. Their home was modest – an old single-story house that was falling into disrepair – but they had a big yard. Much of it was getting overgrown now, but there were gravel paths, a woodshed stocked with firewood, a makeshift shooting range (Casey used to play with BB guns there when he was younger; occasionally he’d let Mae try it, but she had always been a lousy shot), a parked RV trailer, and even a small wooden barn with peeling, faded red paint on its walls; the barn contained mostly junk, including the husk of an old pickup truck that had long-since stopped running. The whole place was a monument to the earthy, run-down lives etched out by people on the economic margins.

Mae loved it. She loved the dirt and the open sky and the woods behind the Hartleys’ property. She and Casey had grown up here, when they were small enough to view the place as a wonderland of outdoor adventure and fun. Yes, the house was smaller and shabbier than Mae’s, and yes, the yard was a tangle of weeds, spotted with filthy plastic lawn chairs and piles of rotting wooden boards, but Mae had never seen it as a depressing tableau of poverty. She had only seen the wild, untamable nature of it, teeming with life. And she had seen that same unkempt vitality reflected in Casey himself, growing bolder and fiercer as he grew bigger with every year, his fiery orange fur streaked with the dirt of the dusty environment that raised him.

So when they turned into his driveway and eased the car up the gravely lane, and when she spotted Casey lounging on the hanging bench on the house’s porch, and when he sat up and gave her a wave as they pulled the car up and cut the engine, it felt like the most natural, welcoming sight in the world.

As soon as the car stopped, Mae jumped out and ran up to him on the porch. She pulled him into a hug, and he returned the embrace.

“Aww, Mae.”

She pulled back and let him go, blushing a little. “Sorry. I missed you.”

Casey ruffled the fur of her head in a way that made her stomach do a handstand. “Missed you too, pal.”

“You would have seen her sooner if she hadn’t slept for 24 hours straight,” Gregg joked as he strode up to them. He held out a hand to Casey and they locked palms and pulled each other in for a tight hug. “Good to see you, brother.”

“Wasn’t my fault,” Mae complained. “I was sleepy!” _And I had a really unnatural dream_ , she added in her head. She hadn’t told anyone about that yet. In fact, she had forgotten all about it until that moment, but now, feeling the memory creeping back in the hazy, half-real way of dreams, a shiver ran down her spine that had nothing to do with the chilly winter air.

As if in subconscious reaction to her shivering, Gregg rubbed his arms through his jacket and eyed Casey in confusion. “Aren’t you cold, man?”

Casey, wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, just shrugged. “Not really? But we can go inside if you want.” He turned to the door and called out, “Mom, my friends are here!”

Casey’s mom poked her head out the front door. “Oh gosh, don’t just stand there out in the cold! Come in, come in!”

They followed Casey inside and crowded around the kitchen table. The room was barely big enough to fit all of them at once – though to be fair, this was mostly due to Angus; Mae and Gregg didn’t take up much space. But as Casey’s mother warmly said, “There’s always room at our table for friends of my son.”

Mrs. Hartley put a kettle on to boil some water for hot cocoa and laid out a plate of sugar cookies for them in the meantime. “Homemade, from an old Hartley family recipe,” she explained.

“Oh muh gud,” Gregg said through a mouthful of cookie. “Theef are even better than thuh ones from Longuhst Night.”

“Thank you very much for your hospitality, ma’am,” Angus said politely.

“Oh, come now, Angus, you’re more than welcome,” Mrs. Hartley beamed, glancing over her shoulder as she washed dishes in the sink. Aside from the other night at the hospital, Mae couldn’t remember the last time she had seen the woman in such a good mood. “I hear you were the one who ran and called the ambulance when my little boy had…when he was in a bad way.” For a moment she sounded choked up, but she recovered and regained her smile. “An’ as far as I’m concerned, that makes you near to family.”

Angus blushed and looked down, mumbling thanks, and Mae reached over and gave his arm a soft pat. She knew how much a show of maternal affection meant to him.

“That’s sweet, mom,” Casey said, “but can you not call me your “little boy” in front of my friends? I’m 19, it’s embarrassing.”

“21,” Mae automatically corrected.

When the room went silent, she glanced up to find everyone’s eyes on her. She gulped down a bite of cookie and said, “Well, you are. Your birthday was last month, so…21.”

“Right,” Casey said in a quiet, disconcerted voice. “I…I forgot.”

Mrs. Hartley pointed a spoon at Casey as she loaded the dishwasher. “Little Mae here knows you better than you know yourself, it seems.”

“I-” Casey stammered. “I just forgot, that’s all.”

“Hey,” Mae said softly, and Casey looked up at her, a note of alarm in his green eyes that stabbed at her heart. “It’s okay.”

The awkward silence was broken by the wail of the kettle on the stove top. Mrs. Hartley hurried to turn it off and set about pouring the hot water into four mugs of cocoa powder. When she was done, she distributed the mugs and said, “Now, that’ll just need a moment to cool down.” At Gregg, who was staring at his cocoa mug with a look of intense desire, she added sternly, “Don’t try and drink it too soon or you’ll burn your tongue!”

“It wouldn’t be the first time he’s learned that lesson,” Angus said with a chuckle.

“And yet,” Gregg bemoaned, “patience is still not among my many virtues.”

Mae smirked, but when she glanced over to see if Casey was laughing, too, she found him with a vacant, far-away look in his eyes. “Hey. Casey, buddy, you with us?”

Casey shook himself and blinked. “Wha-? Uh, yeah, yeah, sorry. I was just…thinking.”

Mrs. Hartley hovered over him, her hand petting back the fur on his head. “You sure you’re feeling okay, sweetie?”

“I’m fine, mom.” He batted her hand away, gulped down his still-steaming mug of cocoa, and abruptly stood up.

“Casey, honey, where are you going?”

“I just need some air,” Casey said flatly, and walked out of the kitchen.

The front door slammed, after which there was a long silence. Mae and the others sat there, not knowing what to say or do. Mrs. Hartley just stood staring after her son, a look of worry on her face.

After a moment, Mae shoved her chair back and murmured, “I’d better go talk to him.”

Gregg stood up beside her. “I’ll come with. Angus?”

“You know him better than I do, Bug, and I don’t think we should crowd him right now.”

“Well, at least one of you will get to enjoy this hot chocolate while it’s still hot,” Mrs. Hartley said.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hartley,” Mae said as she pulled on her coat. “Maybe you can heat it up again for us when we get back?”

Mrs. Hartley gave her a kiss on the top of her head. “Bless you, child, but there are bigger things to concern yourself with than some wasted cocoa. Now go help my boy, like you always do.”

Mae and Gregg stepped outside and looked around for Casey, but he was nowhere in sight.

“Where’s he got to?” Gregg wondered out loud.

“I dunno. Let’s look.”

They wandered around the back of the house, and Mae called out “Casey? Casey, you there?”

No reply. But when Mae perked up her ears and listened, she heard a faint sound.

“Casey, come on!” Gregg shouted, but Mae hushed him, blindly fumbling a paw over his mouth. “Ack, cut it out, Mae!”

“Shhh! Do you hear that?” And now that Gregg was quiet, and they were both listening intently, she understood what she was hearing: Half-strangled sobs, coming from the Hartleys’ barn.

They approached gingerly and pushed the door open. The crying broke off, and the light fell on Casey, sitting in the bed of the unused truck with his legs pulled up to his chest. He quickly rubbed tears from his eyes when he saw them. “I’m okay,” he said defensively.

“You’re not,” Mae told him. “But that’s okay. It’s okay to not be okay, dude.” She climbed up into the bed of the truck with him, Gregg following behind her. “Heh. You know, this is just like the truck where I found you. Or where you found me. Remember that old thing? We used to go out there all the time when we were in high school, even though there was a perfectly good one right here, just because we wanted to get away from everyone else.”

“You can’t see the sky from this one,” Casey said sadly. “I remember, Mae. I remember all of it. But the past 18 months is just…it’s blank. Empty. There’s nothing there. You said I’m 21 now, but the last I remember, I was 19. I lost _a year and a half of my life_.”

“Casey, I’m so sorry –” Mae started, but he turned a suddenly angry gaze on her and cut her off.

“Don’t give me apologies. Give me the truth. I know you know more than you said about what happened to me. What are you so afraid to tell me?”

“Casey, I –”

“Tell me!” His teeth were bared in a snarl, his hands balled into fists, and though it may have been just a trick of the dim light inside the barn, for a horrible instant, she thought she saw his eyes literally darken. Mae had seen him pissed, and she had seen him frustrated, but she had never seen him _enraged_ ; despite herself, she couldn’t help but flinch and recoil from him.

Fortunately, Gregg was quick to intervene. He put a hand on Casey’s shoulder and said, kindly but firmly, “Casey. Simmer down, buddy. You’re scaring us.”

It was like someone flipped a light switch inside Casey; his rage dissipated, and a look of shameful realization washed over him. “I – I’m sorry. It’s just…when I heard Mae say that about my age, I freaked out. I – I need answers. Please.”

Mae wanted to cry, and she wasn’t sure if it was out of sympathy for Casey or the shock of that moment of fear. She swallowed thickly and held back the tears and said, “We were going to tell you, Casey. That’s one reason we came out here today. To tell you everything.”

“I’m sorry,” Casey repeated. He was hugging himself and rubbing his upper arms again, that habitual expression of stress. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Please, Mae. Please tell me.”

Mae took a deep, steadying breath, and said, “I don’t know where you’ve been all this time, or why you’re back now. But here’s what I do know. It’s a kinda long story, so…I’ll start at the beginning.”

And so she told him everything. Not about college, or everything that had happened to her there – those things still felt too personal, too embarrassing to confess to, and she didn’t want Casey to think she was broken or to worry about her – but about everything that had happened since she returned to Possum Springs. About the dreams, and the kidnappings and the ghost hunt, and that night in the woods when she had almost died. About the mine, and the cult, and Black Goat. She omitted the part where she’d “spoken” to that entity herself, and she neglected to mention her prior night’s dream, but everything else she divulged.

Gregg backed her up, nodding and occasionally adding details she’d forgotten. And Casey listened patiently, without interrupting, even when she saw his eyes widen and his frame withdrawn into himself like he was scared. The haunted look in his eyes broke Mae’s heart, but she kept talking. Kept telling him the truth, because he deserved that much, even if it hurt him.

When she was finished, he stared into space and said quietly, his voice wavering just a little, “I was murdered. I knew you weren’t telling me everything, but – but I never thought…”

“I mean, I guess you were, kind of? Clearly didn’t work out that way, though. I mean, look at you! You’re here! You survived!”

“Survived…” Casey repeated. “Survived _what_? Okay, so I was thrown into a…a hole in the ground. And now here I am. I still don’t know what _happened_ , or where I was for a year and a half, or what brought me back, or –”

“Who cares, man?” Gregg said. “I’m still not sure how much I actually believe what those creepy robed fuckers told us. I learned down in that mine that there are some things I just can’t understand. Maybe we never will. But as long as you’re alive and you’re here and everything’s okay, what does it matter?”

Casey shot him an irritated look. “It’s my life, Gregg. It matters to me.” Gregg looked down, chastened, and Casey turned to Mae. “My parents don’t know any of this, do they? You didn’t tell them.”

Mae shook her head and said softly, “We didn’t tell anyone. We didn’t think anyone would believe us if we _did_ tell them. The only ones who know are me and Gregg and Angus and Bea. And you, now.”

Casey closed his eyes and took a shuddering breath, hugging himself even more tightly. After a long silence, he said, eyes still closed. “Those dreams you said you had, Mae. I had a dream like that. When I was in the hospital, after the – the seizure, or whatever it was.”

Mae felt a little squeeze of dread grip her heart, but she tried to keep her voice calm as she asked, “What was the dream about?”

“I was in a desert,” Casey said. “Just black sand and a sky without stars. I was all alone there. But something…” His voice broke, and the last words came out half-strangled. “Something was watching me.”

Mae braced herself without thinking about it, her body tensing with fear, because the last time Casey had described such a thing, he had started convulsing on the floor moments later.

This time, he seemed to be holding himself together better, but his voice still raised the fur on the back of her neck when he whispered, in a tone torn between fear and reverence, “It was that thing, wasn’t it? It’s real. I don’t think that was just a dream, Mae. I think it was a _memory_.”

“I’m sorry,” Mae gasped, tears welling up in her eyes. Something inside her was making her chest tighten with irrational panic. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. This was a mistake. You don’t have to remember, you’re better off not knowing, I shouldn’t have –”

“No,” Casey interrupted, and the sharpness of his tone made her stop short. “No, I’m glad you told me. You shouldn’t have tried to keep something like that a secret.”

“I wasn’t, Casey, I just thought I shouldn’t tell you everything at once, I didn’t want to freak you out.”

“Well I’m pretty fucking freaked out now,” Casey said sarcastically, “so good job with that.” He rubbed his eyes and sat up straight. “I think you guys should go.”

“But –”

“Please, Mae. I need you to leave me alone right now.”

“Hey, dude,” Gregg said sympathetically. “You know we’re always here for you when you need us, right?”

“Sure, Gregg,” Casey said flatly. “Thanks.”

They hopped down from the bed of the truck and started to walk away. But Mae couldn’t stop herself from turning back to look at Casey and asking, a pleading note in her voice, “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

Casey’s laugh was a harsh, mirthless bark, and the way the laughter never reached his eyes made her blood run cold. “Is anyone sure?”

Mae’s heart was aching with concern for Casey, but her brain was telling her, against all reason, to run away as fast as she could. She turned and grabbed Gregg’s arm and walked quickly outside. The morning air felt somehow colder than before. The sun had hidden behind a cloud, in much the same way she wanted to hide from the realization that she couldn’t bear to face: Casey Hartley was scared, yes, lost and vulnerable, and she was scared for him. But a part of her, an instinctive, deep-down part, was also scared _of_ him.

 _The great beast does not return his possessions lightly_ , the God Cat had said.

She did not look back at the boy in the barn, but in her mind’s eye, he was still staring at her, watching as she left, and his eyes were pitch black.


	11. If We Don't Keep Living

Mae didn’t speak the whole drive back, except to fill Angus in on what had happened. Even Gregg was uncharacteristically silent. None of them seemed to know what to say; Angus tried to provide rational reassurance – “He’ll be okay. It’s a lot to take in all at once, but he has us to help him make sense of it.” – but it sounded hollow to Mae’s ears. In any other situation, she would defer to Angus’ unfortunate expertise on trauma, but what Casey was going through wasn’t a normal situation. And Mae could no longer convince herself that the Casey who had returned to them was ever going to be quite the same as the Casey she’d known.

But then, maybe she wasn’t the same Mae, either. She’d found a way to live with her fractured fault lines, with her fear and her guilt, with the ever-present threat of instability and impermanence. Maybe she could help Casey do the same. Whatever happened, she wasn’t going to write him off as broken. She was going to do everything she could to help him, like she wished she’d had someone to do for her back in college.

She owed Bea another apology. So as soon as the boys dropped her back off at home, she went upstairs to her room, turned on her computer, and sent Bea a text:

_Hey, Bea. Just got back from Casey’s. Gregg’s probably going to tell you all about it when he returns the car, but…yeah. Told him everything. Could have gone better._

A moment later, she added: _I think I get it now. Why you reacted the way you did. And I’m sorry for being such a bitch to you about it._

She lay back on her bed and stared up at the ceiling. It was still barely noon, and she didn’t know what to do with herself today; she felt tired now that she was lying down, but her mind was too worked up to let her take a nap, and anyways, she was afraid of what she might dream about.

The minutes ticked on by, and Bea didn’t reply to her text. Well, that wasn’t too surprising; she was working. Mae wanted to text Casey, but he had requested space, and she didn’t want to seem needy. She could text Gregg or Angus, but what was there to say, really? Neither of them would be able to tell her anything she didn’t already know.

She had to get up and get out of there. Sitting in her room doing nothing wasn’t going to make her feel any better.

With the effort of the perpetually weary, she sat up, left her room, and went outside. It was crisp but fairly warm out; the sun was shining again, and the day was warming up as the hours progressed.

Mae set off towards town, walking down the familiar streets without a clear purpose or destination; but then, that was nothing new, was it? How many times had she done exactly this? Wandering aimlessly around what Casey had called these “tired old streets” in his song.

She was so wrapped up in her own head that she almost walked by Selmers without noticing she was there.

“Hey, Mae!”

Mae stopped midstep, pivoted and spun around. “Woah, sorry, hey Selmers! Almost didn’t see you there!”

Selmers was sitting on her front steps, hands buried in the pockets of her sweater. She did that a lot; just sat there, watching the town go by. Selmers was a passive person at first glance, but Mae knew her to also be keenly observant and insightful. She had a mind that was wasted on the mundanity of life in Possum Springs.

“Sorry to waylay you,” Selmers said. “You looked a bit lost in thought. You busy?”

“Not really,” Mae said, and then sighed and added, “Not at all, actually. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Selmers patted the step beside her, and Mae walked over and sat down.

“Heard Casey’s back,” Selmers said. “Is it true?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Word’s all over town by now. Someone said they saw him being put in the ambulance at Longest Night. That interruption caused a bit of a stir, y’know.”

Mae thought back. There had been some curious onlookers, come to think of it, when the ambulance had arrived. She had just been too worried about Casey at the time to really notice or care. And then Casey’s parents would probably have told their friends the news, and they would have told _their_ friends, and so on. It didn’t take long for news to travel in Possum Springs.

She leaned her head back, looking at the sky. “I just came from his place, actually.”

“How is he?”

“I don’t know. He had a seizure that first night after I found him outside town. Hence the ambulance. But he seems okay now. He just doesn’t remember anything that happened to him since he went missing, so…he’s kind of upset.”

“He has amnesia?”

“That’s the word,” Mae said with a sigh.

“Damn,” Selmers said. “That’s wild. Gotta wonder what happened to him.”

“I don’t know,” Mae lied. She liked and trusted Selmers, but she’d never told her about the cult or what happened in the mine. It wasn’t just her secret to tell, and it wasn’t knowledge anyone else needed to be burdened by. But it occurred to her now that with questions circulating about Casey’s reappearance, she was going to have to lie to a lot of people.

They sat in silence for a while, until Selmers suddenly recited, “Lost boy, now is found. Home again, back in town. This time we pray, he will stay. Where he belongs, with his Mae.”

Mae blushed. “I’m not “his Mae.””

Selmers nudged her with her elbow and smiled. “Aren’t you, though? You said you found him. And you two used to be inseparable back in the day, right? I think if nothing else, he’s certainly “your” Casey.”

“Oh god,” Mae said, hiding her face. “Stop it.”

“Got a little crush there, neighbor?” Selmers teased.

“Selmers. Please. Stop talking.”

“It’s okay to admit it! What’s the matter, you don’t think he feels the same way?”

“Aagh, I have no idea,” Mae blurted out. “We’ve always been good friends, but like…just friends, is all. Romance is probably the last thing on his mind right now, anyway.”

“You just gotta be there for him, Mae. Give him support. I won’t pretend to understand what he’s going through, but he probably just needs a little time to get his bearings. He’s lucky to have a friend who loves him to help him through it.”

“Okay, okay,” Mae said, standing up. “I’m outta here. Thanks for the pep talk, Selmers.”

“Any time.”

A few steps away, Mae looked back over her shoulder and said, “The poem wasn’t half bad, though.”

Selmers smiled. “I’ll keep working on it.”

Mae continued wandering further into town, but now she tried to be more aware of her surroundings. In so doing, she noticed several of the townspeople were watching her as she walked by. Most likely, like Selmers, they’d heard about Casey and wanted to know more. She kept purposefully walking, not looking at anyone. She didn’t want to get roped into telling the story to every person she knew. It would only increase the number of lies by omission that she had to tell.

She glanced through the window of the Ol’ Pickaxe as she passed, but she couldn’t see Bea behind the counter. She was probably busy with something. Mae didn’t want to disturb her while she was working; Bea was annoyed with her enough as it was.

So she kept on going, until when she was nearing Towne Centre, she heard a voice squeaking down at her from the rooftops: “Mae!”

She looked up, shadowing her eyes with her hand. Lori Meyers was perched high above, sitting on a chimney and waving down at her. Mae waved back and shouted, “One sec!”

A bit of clambering and a few agile leaps along the rooftops later, and Mae was standing on the roof next to the 15-year-old, panting slightly.

“1 minute 20 seconds,” Lori announced. “You’re getting slow in your old age.”

Mae screwed up her mouth in exaggerated annoyance. “Shut up before I push you off this roof, kid.”

Lori laughed, grinning wide. The morbid joke-threats were right up her alley, and Mae knew it. “We’re so high up! I’d go splat!”

“Serve you right for disrespecting your elders.”

“I’d come back as a ghost and haunt your ass until your dying day, though. I’d never rest until my earthly loose ends were resolved!”

Mae bit her lip, looking out over the town. The breeze tugged gently at her fur. Casey wasn’t a ghost, but was that why he had come back? Some unfinished business? Beyond, you know, the rest of his entire unlived life.

Lori gave her a soft nudge with her foot. “Still with us, killer? You’ve got a haunted look in your eye.”

Mae shook herself and turned her attention back to her friend. “Sorry. Guess I am feeling a bit haunted right now.”

“You’re talking about Hartley, aren’t you?”

Mae rubbed the back of her neck and sighed. “So you heard too, huh?”

“Everyone’s heard!” Lori squeaked. “It’s the only exciting thing that’s happened around here in months! It’s so mysterious, too! Reappearing as suddenly as he vanished! Have you talked to him? Is he okay? Tell me everything!”

“Lori, come on…”

Lori hopped down from the chimney and made a cute face, looking up at Mae with her big mousy eyes. “ _Pleeeease?”_

“Okay, fine! Geez!” Mae couldn’t say no to Lori. The kid was like the little sister she’d never had.

So she sat down on the roof with Lori and told her the story – minus, of course, all the scary bits that she’d never told anyone, the murder cults and eldritch horrors. It would be extremely Lori’s kind of story, but it was all too real, and Mae didn’t want to legitimately freak her out.

“I really thought he was dead, Lori,” she finished. “I grieved for him. I thought I’d never see him again. And now here he is.”

“That’s a happy ending though, isn’t it?” Lori said. “You get your boy back and you get to be together!”

 _God, why does everyone keep calling him “my” boy?_ “I’m not sure it’s that simple, Lori. He’s been acting different since he got back. He’s been through a lot and I…I don’t know if things can just go back to normal. I want them to, so so badly, but like, what if he’s just too damaged by all this?”

“Whadda ya mean, different? Do you think he…” – she gasped and dropped her voice to a whisper – “came back wrong?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Lori’s wide eyes lit up and she started babbling excitedly. “It’s like in this one old movie, _Resurrector 2: The Re-reanimating_ , this guy’s girlfriend dies and he’s all sad about it so he does a magic spell and it returns her from the grave but she’s not the same because her soul is still in the afterlife or whatever so she comes back as a mindless zombie and she eats his heart!! It’s kinda romantic, really. Romantic and gory! Even if the blood is really fake-looking and cheesy, I mean the budget was like 10 dollars so they just used –”

“Casey’s not a zombie,” Mae interrupted. “You’ve been watching too many horror movies.”

“Oh, Mae,” Lori said, “you know there’s no such thing as too many horror movies.”

“Maybe not for you,” Mae muttered. “I get enough horror in real life, thanks.”

Lori put her chin in her hands and looked at Mae cutely. “Are all 21-year-olds this depressing? Is it just an old person thing?”

Mae rolled her eyes. “Look, I get what you’re doing. Being a goofy little pest to try and cheer me up. I’m just not in the mood.”

“I worry about you!” Lori insisted. “You used to be more fun. Now you’re all mopey and sad half the time.”

“Maybe I’ve grown up.”

Lori pulled a face. “I hope I don’t grow up, then. Looks awful.”

“It’s a lot better than dying young.” _Casey would vouch for that, I’m sure._ Mae sat up from the roof. “I’m gonna get going.”

“Mae, wait!” Lori squeaked. She put a hand in her jacket pocket and produced a flattened metal figurine.

“You’re still squashing these little dudes on the train tracks?”

“Haha, no, I haven’t done that in ages,” Lori laughed. “I keep this one with me as, like, a reminder, you know?” She thrust her hand out to Mae. “But I think you need the reminder more than me. So I want you to have it.”

Mae took it and turned it over in her hand, examining it. The figure had been humanoid, once, before it experienced its gruesome disfigurement at the hands of a fast-moving train. “What’s it a reminder of?”

“That damaged things aren’t worthless,” Lori said earnestly. “They’re just different. They’re still beautiful in their own way.”

It was almost alarming, how suddenly Mae felt the urge to cry. She blinked back tears, took a breath and exhaled deeply, and said, “Thanks, weirdo.”

Lori smiled. “You’re welcome, killer. Let me know how it goes with your zombie boyfriend!”

“He’s not a zombie,” Mae said, and took a running jump back over to the adjacent rooftop. When she landed, she looked over her shoulder and added, “And he’s not my boyfriend!”

“Not _yet_!” Lori called back.

Mae rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t help but smile as she made her way back to the ground. Lori was the only person she allowed to call her “killer,” and the only person this side of Gregg who she could take some friendly teasing from without getting defensive. She hadn’t been sure what she was looking for when she left the house, but now, after speaking to Selmers and Lori, she thought she may have found it.

So she went back home, scrounged some lunch from out of the fridge, and took it up to her room to eat while she checked her messages.

Bea still hadn’t texted back, but there was a message from Gregg. It read:

_Still on for band practice tonight dude???_

Shit, she’d totally forgotten what day of the week it even was. With everything else going on, band practice had been far from her mind. But it sounded like a pretty appealing idea right now, so she wrote back:

_Hell yeah, it’ll be nice to do something normal. See u there._

She thought again about texting Casey, but it didn’t feel right. As much as she was dying to speak to him, she knew she should respect his wishes and give him time. She would reach out to him tomorrow, assuming he hadn’t done so first by then.

Band practice wasn’t until 5:30, after Bea got off work, so she had some time to kill, and she was tired of thinking. She fired up Demontower and let herself sink into the familiar rhythms of the well-worn game. She had run through it so many times by now that it wasn’t even hard anymore, but it took just enough focus to keep her brain occupied.

When it was almost 5, she pulled herself away from the computer, bundled up in her winter jacket and gloves, and headed back into town.

When she got to the Party Barn, Bea, Gregg and Angus were already there, setting up. Angus saw her first, and he leaned over into the mic and said, “Hi, Mae.”

The mic caused his deep voice to echo through the room in a way that made her smile. “Hey, Angus.”

“Mae!” Gregg said cheerfully. “Ready for some tunes?”

“You know it, dude!”

But it wasn’t Gregg or the instruments that she approached first. It was Bea, sitting on the edge of the stage with her fake cigarette at a perfect ‘casually askew’ angle. Mae hopped up beside her, leaving a respectful distance between them. “How was work?”

“Tiring,” Bea said. “How was Casey?”

“Worrying. Did you get my text?”

“Yeah.”

“I meant it, Bea. I’m really sorry.”

Bea looked at her and gave a raspy little sigh. “I know. And I’m sorry, too. I should have been happy for you, but the shock of seeing Casey alive like that was just…I don’t think I know how to accept good things without assuming they’re too good to be true.”

“Well,” Mae admitted, “it would kinda buck our usual trends if we got some good luck for a change.”

Bea laughed darkly. “This _is_ still Possum Springs. I’m used to this place taking things away from us, not giving them back.”

“Ugh. Too real.”

Mae wanted to press the subject further, but they were interrupted by Gregg shouting, “Are we gonna make some music or what?”

Mae rolled her eyes at Bea and shouted back, “Just waiting on you, dude!”

“Well, wait no more!” Gregg proclaimed. His demeanor was a thousand percent more energetic than he had been in the morning, but Mae was used to that. “What are we in the mood for? I’m thinking Weird Autumn.”

“You know it’s not autumn anymore, right?” Mae pointed out.

Gregg rolled his eyes and gave his guitar strings a discordant strum. “Well until we write a song called Weird Winter, Mae, this will have to do.”

As everyone took their positions, Mae leaned in towards Gregg and asked, “So, uh…have you heard from Casey since this morning?”

Angus cleared his throat and glanced over. “Yeah, Mae, about that…”

A waiting silence fell over them for a moment, until Mae said tentatively, “ _Yes_ , Angus?”

Gregg looked a bit sheepish. “He never replied, so don’t get your hopes up, but, well…Angus and I didn’t want him to feel like he had to be alone, so –”

His voice was cut off by the screech of the sticky door being forced open. Casey Hartley stood in the doorway, dressed in a Witch Dagger t-shirt and ripped jeans, a guitar case slung over his shoulder. “Hey, guys,” he grinned. “You didn’t start without me, did you?”


	12. The Best Ever Unnamed Punk Band in Possum Springs

Mae blinked in surprise, but her heart leapt when she saw Casey in the doorway smiling at her. “Casey?”

“Hope I’m not late,” Casey said casually as he approached them and unslung the guitar case from his shoulder. “I found my old guitar at the house. Guess I should be glad my folks didn’t sell it like they did my drum set.”

“You’re just in time, Casey,” Angus said warmly. “Glad you could make it.”

Casey winked at him. “Glad you invited me. So who’s ready to jam?”

Gregg clapped Casey on the shoulder and grinned. “Good to have you back, dude.”

“Yeah,” Bea rasped. “You’re looking…well.”

She gave a silent, questioning look to Mae, which Mae returned with a shrug. She was as baffled as anyone by Casey’s improved demeanor. It was wonderful to see him smiling, but she had no idea how quickly his mood could have changed in just a few hours. _Are we just pretending that this morning never happened?_

“Hey, Casey,” she said cautiously. “Glad to see you’re feeling better.”

“’Sup, Mae. Hey, I’m sorry if I was a little…y’know…last time we spoke. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“It’s all good,” she said, with an awkward little laugh. “Water under the bridge! Where water belongs! Like in the river, y’know? ‘Cept our bridge here in town’s just over dry riverbed. There’s possums and shit live down there.” She glanced at Bea, who gave her an exasperated ‘wtf are you doing?’ stare. “Haha, anyways. I like your shirt,” she pivoted, pointing at Casey’s chest.

“Oh,” Casey said. “Yeah, thanks. Witchdaggah! Still your favorite, right?”

Mae gulped a little. “Yeah! That’s right…” Had he worn that shirt here just because he knew it was her favorite band? She suddenly felt too warm, even though there was no heating in the Party Barn. “Best doom metal band ever, haha.”

“ _So_ ,” Gregg interrupted, clearing his throat, “what do you want to play, man? Your choice!” As Casey turned around, Mae leaned over from behind his back and mouthed a silent ‘thank you’ to Gregg.

“If it’s my pick, how ‘bout one I wrote?” Casey said. “Die Anywhere Else?”

“Bit morbid in retrospect, don’t you think?” Bea observed wryly.

Casey scoffed. “I thought you liked morbid, Santello.”

Bea took her cigarette out of her mouth and gave him a smile that showed off all her teeth. “Maybe you don’t know what I like as well as you think, Hartley.”

“Okay, enough chit-chat, let’s play the song!” Mae interrupted. She shot a frown at Bea and whispered, “Chill, will you?” Bea huffed a little but held her tongue.

“I’ll sit this one out,” Gregg said, hopping down from the stage. “You didn’t write this song for three guitar players, Case, remember? You wrote it while Mae was away. Gonna have to make some tweaks now that the whole band’s back together. Maybe see about getting an actual drum set again.”

As Casey took Gregg’s place, Mae saw Bea looking down, her hand hovering over the keyboard of her laptop. “What would Bea play, then?” she piped up. “If you had an actual drummer again, I mean.”

Gregg gave her a blank look and shrugged. “I dunno, we’ll figure something out.”

Bea looked dissatisfied with this answer, but she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t meet Mae’s eyes.

Mae jumped a little as Casey nudged her playfully with the end of his guitar. “You know how this one goes, right, Mae?”

She turned her attention back to him, blushing slightly. “Every note.”

Casey smiled and jumped to the front of the stage, snatching the mic from Angus. “Gooooood evening, listeners! This is ACAB Radio coming to you live from Possum Springs, and you’re about to be serenaded by the soothing, dulcet punk rock tones of…hey, did you guys ever get around to naming the band?”

“Eh,” Gregg shrugged. “Not so much, no.”

“The dulcet tones of Fuck It We’ll Name It Eventually!” He handed the mic back to Angus. “All you, big guy. Everyone ready? Then what are we waiting for? Let’s make some fucking noise!”

As soon as the first notes hit Mae’s ears, she breathed a silent thanks that Casey hadn’t been there to see her struggle through learning his song on the fly at that first band practice after returning home. She’d butchered it then, but now the chords were long-since memorized, and she only had to half pay attention to hit every note on time – which left the other half of her attention free to watch Casey. He was the new element in their musical equation; and yet familiar, too, a long-lost piece of the puzzle. She’d enjoyed the band, with or without him, but she hadn’t realized until just now how much they’d been suffering from his absence. Making music alongside Casey Hartley just felt _right_. In that moment, everything but her and her friends and the music just dropped away, and she could forget every worry, every episode, every nightmare she’d ever had.

She could see that he felt the same way. Casey looked rhapsodic; his head back, eyes half-closed, mouthing along with the lyrics and strumming his guitar with such vigor that he couldn’t stand still. His whole body swayed and bounced along with the music. He looked so free, so alive and happy dancing like that, that Mae felt an overwhelming burst of affection. Tears started welling up in her eyes, but she couldn’t take her hands off the guitar long enough to wipe them away.

And then Casey looked right at her and grinned, and it was the opposite of his bitter smile from that morning: joyous, playful and infectious. She smiled back through watery eyes, and he bobbed his head up and down and started singing the lyrics at her. “I just want to diiieeee anywhere else! If only I could die, anywhere else!”

Mae laughed and sang back, in a full-throated, off-key voice, “Come with me, let’s die anywhere else! An-y-where! Just not here! Oh no!”

She shot a glance at Angus, worried that they were upstaging him, but he was smiling as he sang into the mic. Below them, Gregg was jumping up and down around the empty floor of the Barn, waving his arms in the air and giving occasional shouts of “Yeah!” and “Woooooo!” like a hyperactive fanboy seeing his favorite band in concert for the first time. Even Bea was smiling.

When they reached the last notes of the song, there was so much energy in the room that for a moment they just held the silence, letting that energy hang there in the reverberation as they panted, out of breath. Mae caught Casey’s eye, and there was a glimmer there, something in the exhilarated way he was looking at her, that made her stomach twist in nervous excitement.

Gregg broke the silence first. “Best. Die Anywhere Else. Ever.”

“Certainly our most exuberant performance in recent memory,” Angus added.

“Thanks, you guys,” Casey said. “For keeping my song alive for me.”

“Had to keep some part of you alive, dude,” Gregg said. He sniffed and dabbed self-consciously at his eye.

“Casey, that felt so –” Mae started to say, but he reached out and gave her shoulder a squeeze and she suddenly couldn’t form words anymore.

“Later, Mae,” he said with a soft smile. Raising his voice, he added, “Who wants to do another song? I _know_ you guys have some I haven’t heard yet!”

They played a few more songs, some of which Casey joined in and some he just watched. Mae found herself feeling more self-conscious than usual with Casey watching, and she cringed inside every time she missed a note, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was busy taking notes in his head, learning lyrics and chords, watching so he could play the songs himself eventually. And Mae thought she understood why he’d come here, why he was throwing himself into the band again – it gave him something that he had a handle on, that he felt comfortable with and knew how to control. Music was the TV he left on in the room so he wouldn’t feel alone.

When they’d finished their mini setlist and were packing up for the night, Mae approached Casey and, feeling bold, drew him into a hug, her cheek pressed against his chest. “That was really nice.”

He hugged her back and said, “Yeah. It really was.”

She pulled back and asked, “Soooo…do you need to get home now? How’d you get all the way down here, anyway?”

“I rode my old bike. It’s parked outside. And I guess I could stay out a while longer, but my parents are gonna want to know where I am. They’re so protective now that I’m back.”

Mae raised her voice. “Hey guys, are we making a celebratory pizza run or something after this?”

“I’ve got to go home and help my dad with dinner,” Bea said.

Gregg and Angus exchanged a look. “We’ve got, uh, plans. Stuff to do…at home. By ourselves. You know how it is.”

Mae threw her hands up in mock frustration. “Really? No one wants to hang with me and our dearly not-deceased friend?”

Angus cleared his throat and said, “Mae, why don’t you have Casey over for dinner at your place?”

“That’s – not a bad idea, actually.” She turned to Casey. “You game for supper at Café Borowski?”

Casey chewed his lip for a moment, thinking. “You’re sure your folks would be okay with me showing up unannounced?”

“Nonsense,” Mae scoffed. “They’d love to see you. And we can call your house from my house and let your own ‘rents know where you are, so they won’t worry. It’ll be great! My mom makes the best food.”

“I remember,” Casey said with a smile. “Alright, then. Dinner it is.”

“Great!” Gregg exclaimed. “Mae, can I talk to you for a sec?”

She glanced at Casey, and he shrugged and said, “I’ll go unlock my bike.” He left, Bea and Angus following him out, leaving Mae alone with Gregg.

“What’s up, buddy?”

Gregg grinned. “I got a little something for you and Casey, just in case. Close your eyes and hold out your hand.”

With only slight hesitation, Mae complied. She felt Gregg place an object on her palm, and opened her eyes again. It was a 3-pack of latex condoms.

She blushed instantly and thrust the condoms at him. “Aaah, Gregg! I don’t need these!”

He pushed her hand back toward her. “Just in case, dude.”

“It’s not like – I don’t – we’re not going to…” she sputtered. “Hey, wait a second! Inviting Casey here, convincing me to bring him back to my house…you and Angus, you’re – you’re trying to set me up!”

But Gregg was already turning and heading toward the door. He winked at her over his shoulder and repeated, “Just in case!”

“What makes you think I don’t already have some of these?” Mae shouted after him. She didn’t, of course, and she added angrily to herself, “Aside from, like, everything about me. Damn it, Gregg.”

She looked down at the condoms in her hand. She didn’t need these. Gregg ought to get his mind out of the gutter. She wasn’t going to sleep with Casey tonight, that was ridiculous. She didn’t even know if he felt that way about her, and he’d only been alive again for like 48 hours, so no way was that a realistic expectation. It just wasn’t going to happen, certainly not in her little attic bedroom on her fold-down bed with her parents sleeping downstairs. Annnnd she was thinking about it now. Fuck.

She pocketed the condoms and followed Gregg out the door, muttering swear words under her breath.

 _Just in case_.


	13. Things That Can Save Us

Mae didn’t want to let go.

Partly this was because she was perched side-saddle on the frame above the back wheel of Casey’s bike, legs dangling in the air, and the bike was speeding rather fast down the hilly streets of Possum Springs. But mainly it was because she had her arms wrapped tightly around Casey’s waist, and she could feel the rise and fall of his stomach as he breathed hard and steady, and she could have lived in that moment forever. Just her with the wind against her face and the boy in her arms.

But then before she knew it, they reached her street and Casey pulled up in front of her house and hit the brakes, and Mae reluctantly hopped off the bike. Moments never lasted, and even when there were more and better moments just ahead, it was always a little hard to let go.

“Told you I’d get you home safe,” Casey said with a wink. He was still in a surprisingly good mood, and he didn’t even look out of breath; Mae would never have guessed that he’d just biked both their asses all the way back from the middle of town. Had he always had so much stamina? It was very…distracting.

“Hey, I never doubted you!” she protested. “Just because you used to wipe out on your bike or your skateboard about half a dozen times a day…”

Casey laughed. “You’re exaggerating.”

“Barely.”

He took a smooth step toward her, slipped his hand under her chin, and unbuckled and removed her helmet; the helmet that he’d insisted she wear instead of him. “That was when I didn’t have any precious passengers.”

Mae’s brain crashed and rebooted in the span of a couple seconds. _PRECIOUS..._

She swallowed roughly and said, “Well, uh, shall we?”

Casey gestured to the door. “Ladies first.”

Had she been a bit less flustered, she might have objected to the label of “lady” – she had always been far too much of a tomboy to feel comfortable with that term, even in passing. As it was, she brushed past him, avoiding eye contact, and hoping it was dark enough that he wouldn’t notice how self-conscious she looked.

She unlocked the door with her key and pushed it open. “Mom, Dad! I’m home.”

Her mom poked her head out from the kitchen. “Hey, Mae! You’re just in time for dinn-” She broke off and hurried into the living room, a big smile breaking out on her face. “Casey Hartley, oh my goodness! We haven’t seen you in so long! Come here, kiddo!”

“Mommmm, no need to make a fuss,” Mae groaned as her mother pulled Casey into an enveloping hug, but she was ignored.

“You look taller,” Mae’s mom said, stepping back and scrutinizing Casey. “Or maybe that’s just my memory playing tricks on me. And skinnier, too. Have you been eating enough since you got back?”

“Sorry, Casey. She just wishes she had a kid who wasn’t a fatass,” Mae joked.

“You’re not a fatass, Mae,” Casey insisted seriously. To her mom, he added, “It’s nice to see you, too, Mrs. Borowski. And I’m glad I’m not intruding, because I am pretty hungry.” He gave her a charming smile.

“Well, I have just the thing,” Mae’s mom said. “Come in, come sit down, it’ll be ready in a moment.”

“Is that Casey Hartley?” came her dad’s voice from the kitchen. They followed Mae’s mom inside and saw her dad already sitting at the dinner table. He stood up when he saw them and shook Casey’s hand. “Good to see you up and about, son. Mae told us everything.”

“That right?” Casey said, with a quick glance at Mae. She gave him a face that she hoped conveyed ‘well, maybe not _everything_.’

“So you really don’t remember anything since last year, huh?” her dad asked.

Casey rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Yeah, it’s all, uh, it’s kind of a blur. The doctors don’t know what caused it.”

“Well, we’re just glad you’re okay, Casey,” her mom said. “Now let’s not stand on ceremony!”

They washed their hands, sat down around the table, and said grace, holding hands; Casey’s hand was warm and solid in Mae’s, and she found it hard to concentrate on the familiar words. The food soon had her full attention, however – dinner was spaghetti, salad, chickpea soup and garlic bread, and all of it made her mouth water. She hadn’t realized how hungry she had gotten.

Casey ate rather sparingly; enough not to be rude, but he didn’t seem to have the same appetite Mae did. This worried her a little, before she caught herself. _God, I’m turning into my mom_. Casey had enough moms in his life without her fretting over him.

Fortunately, her parents were good enough to not be overbearing or ask Casey too many hard-to-answer questions about his missing months. They seemed content just having him around again, and so the conversation turned to reminiscing about the exploits he and Mae had gotten into when they were younger, which were mostly embarrassing. But for once, she didn’t mind, because every embarrassment was blunted by time and context, and every memory she had with Casey was valuable to her. She’d been over them all so many times since his “death,” trying to hold onto each and every one, no matter how painful. So it was a joy to revisit them now without the sting of grief attached, laughing alongside her childhood companion, now alive and fully-grown.

When they’d finished the meal, Mae leaned back in her chair, feeling full and happy. “I’m stuffed. That was so good, Mom.”

“Glad you thought so, honey,” her mom said. “Casey, did you like it?”

“Yeah, Mrs. B, it was delicious. Almost as good as my own mom’s cooking, and _oh crap I forgot to call my parents_.”

“Oh yeah, shit, you were gonna let ‘em know you were coming over,” Mae said. “Geez, they’re gonna be worried.”

“Here, Casey honey, you can use our phone,” Mae’s mom offered, taking it from its stand and holding it out to him.

Casey took the phone, but Mae stopped him with a hand on his arm, a sudden thought occurring to her. “Actually…if he wants to and they’re cool with it, do you think Casey could ask his folks for permission to stay the night?”

Her dad’s mouth twitched into a smile. “You haven’t had a sleepover since you were a kitten, kitten.”

“I know, it’s just…things have been so crazy, you have no idea, and this has been so nice tonight, just having Casey over, just hanging out like when we were kids. And I just, I want it to keep going.”

“You know, that’s not a bad idea,” Casey said. “I like the sound of that. I need a break from home, anyways. I love my folks, but it’s been so awkward since they got me back. They barely let me out of their sight yesterday – I was lucky just to be allowed to go to band practice tonight. I get where they’re coming from, but like…every time they look at me, I can see all the questions they’re dying to ask, and I don’t know what to tell them, and it’s exhausting. You guys are a breath of fresh air by comparison.”

So, Mae thought, he hadn’t told his parents what they’d told him that morning. At least not yet. Maybe he was working up to it. Or maybe he’d decided to just ignore it, to put on a cheery, in-control face and act like nothing was wrong. That seemed like a Caseyish thing to do.

Mae’s dad looked at her mom, deliberating. “Well…”

Her mom gestured to the living room. “A quick word, Mae?”

Mae followed her mom into the other room, quickly formulating an argument in her head. She could feel an uncomfortable conversation coming.

“So,” her mom said quietly, “you’re sure childhood nostalgia is the only reason you want to have Casey spend the night?”

“ _Mom_ ,” Mae hissed. “It’s not like that!”

“Sweetie, I’ve been your mom for a long time, and I know you pretty well. But even if I didn’t, anyone with eyes could see the way you’ve been stealing glances at that boy all evening.”

“Gahhh!” Mae protested. “Mom, come on.” She lowered her voice and said, “Okay, fine, maybe I’m a little tiny bit into Casey. But I just want to spend more time with him, okay? I know he’s been gone a while, but he’s the same Casey who’s known me since we were kids, and I trust him. And you trust me, right? I’m not gonna do anything, y’know, stupid. I’m not _that_ much of a fuckup.” _Plus,_ she added silently, _I’m an adult. I’m not some naïve kid anymore and I don’t need to be treated like one._

She could practically feel the pack of condoms burning a hole in her pocket.

“Mae,” her mother frowned. “I never said you were a fuckup.”

“Whatever. Just…can Casey stay? Please?”

Her mom looked from Mae’s pleading face to Casey standing awkwardly in the kitchen trying not to eavesdrop. “Okay, sweetie. If his parents are fine with it, he’s welcome.”

Mae felt her body letting go of a tension that she hadn’t even realized she was holding. “Thanks, Mom. Really.”

She went back into the kitchen, a smile building on her face. “You got the green light, Casey. Put on your best powers of persuasion and give the ‘rents a call.”

“Roger that. Here goes nothing…”

He paused, hesitating, his finger hovering over the buttons on the phone with a frown on his face.

“What’s wrong?” Mae asked.

“I…” Casey said slowly. “I can’t remember my phone number.”

Mae exchanged a worried glance with her mom, who hurried to step in. “It’s in our address book, Casey dear, just give me one second…”

“Thanks, Mrs. B,” Casey said. “Sorry, just having a brain fart moment here, y’know? So embarrassing.” He laughed lightly, but it sounded forced.

“Here you go,” Mae’s mother said, handing him the address book. He punched the number in, took a deep breath, composing himself, and hit call.

One conversation, a few apologies, and a lot of insistent arguments about the importance of spending time with his friends later, Casey hung up the phone and grinned. “They said yes. Eventually.”

Mae gave him a high-five. “Hell. Hecking. Yeah.” She clasped her hands together excitedly. “This calls for popcorn and a cheesy 80s action movie marathon!”

Casey smiled at her in a way that made her heart forget how to do its job for a second. “Sure. Whatever will make you happy, Mae.”

**\----**

“I’m surprised you’re so into this movie,” Casey said. “It’s pretty macho for you.” They were watching _Rambo Vs Robocop_. Mae’s folks had retreated to their room upstairs to give them some space, and now it was just the two of them and the loud sounds of movie violence.

“I can be macho!” Mae insisted, though she couldn’t keep a straight face when Casey snorted in amusement. “Come on, though, this movie rules. Who doesn’t fantasize about kicking the ass of a robocop?”

“ACAB,” Casey agreed. “Including and perhaps especially robocops.”

“I’m glad we don’t have robocops in real life. That would be a nightmare.”

“I’d kick all their metal asses,” Casey said. “No cyborg copper’s gonna catch me alive!”

“They can’t arrest you if you blow them up first!”

Casey laughed, a relaxed, carefree sound. With a sly grin he added, “Admit it, though, you also like the buff, shirtless men blowing stuff up.”

Mae blushed and screwed her mouth up. “I admit nothing.”

“I didn’t know that was your type,” he teased, nudging her in the ribs with his foot. He was sprawled out lengthwise on the sofa, a picture of lanky repose, and he seemed more interested in looking at Mae than at the TV, which was making her feel self-conscious in the most wonderfully uncomfortable way.

“I wouldn’t say it’s my _type_ ,” she said. “Though I do like a person with a muscle or two. But nah, it’s more like a, what do you call it, a plutonium ideal.”

“ _Platonic_ ideal,” Casey corrected. “Come on, Mae, you’re supposed to be the smart one of the two of us.”

Mae laughed, taken aback. “Am I? Geez, we’re in trouble, then.”

“You’re the college-educated girl, I mean. I’m just the backwater dirtball from the middle of nowhere.”

“I wasn’t exactly paying much attention in college. And hey, I’m from the same middle of nowhere, you know!”

Casey sat up. “Speaking of, uh, you never really told me why you’re not still off at school.”

On the TV, a man with a large rocket launcher screamed in wordless rage before blowing up a truck full of robots. Mae sighed and turned the volume down.

She turned to Casey. He was watching her with interest. She chewed on her bottom lip for a moment, searching for the words. “You remember what happened with Andy Cullen at that softball match in 9th grade? What I…what I did?”

Casey inhaled sharply. “Of course I do. I was there in the stands with Gregg, remember? But you got better after that, right? You were doing fine last time I saw you.”

“I was doing fine _at home_ ,” Mae said quietly. “But that wasn’t the end of it.”

Casey edged closer to her, his eyes big and concerned. “You can tell me.”

“Okay, dude, tell you what – I’ll tell you all about it if you tell me how you managed to perform an emotional 180 since this morning.”

He blinked at her. “Um…”

“Come on, man. You were so upset when I left you this morning, and then you show up at band practice acting like your old self again. Don’t get me wrong, I like this whole carefree attitude you’ve got going on, but take it from someone who knows, it’s not always best to just push everything down and ignore it.”

“I’m not ignoring it,” Casey scoffed. “You’re right, I was pretty upset this morning. The stuff you told me…the things that happened to me that I can’t even remember…it was fucking with my head all afternoon. So I lied to my parents about when band practice started, and I left the house early and I went to the old mine.”

Mae gripped the couch cushion so hard she could feel her fingernails biting into the leather. “You _what??_ ”

“Woah, easy,” Casey said in alarm. “Nothing bad happened. Obviously, I’m fine.”

“That mine is dangerous,” Mae chided. “Probably unstable, too. Last time I was there, I accidentally caused a cave-in.”

“I know,” Casey said. “I saw the collapsed tunnel. Nothing there but dead-end tunnels and rocks, but like, I needed to see it with my own eyes. Not that I didn’t believe you, but I needed to _know_.”

“I think I understand that,” Mae admitted. She was picturing Casey standing in the dark in the place where he died, trying to find something, any little mark, that would make it real in his head. “Did…did you remember anything, while you were down there?”

He shook his head. “No…but I had a realization. It was like a voice in my head suddenly spoke up and said, “Stop obsessing over this. Get out of here. Whatever happened, happened, and now you’re alive, and you’re wasting it looking back into the dark. Go be alive.” So I did. I went to where my friends were, and I threw myself into old rhythms, and now I’m here. With you. Living my life instead of looking back.”

“Wow,” Mae said. “You make that sound so easy.”

Casey laughed. “It’s not. Trust me. It’s like I’m a car, and all that blank space in my memory is a black van driving behind me, and I’m trying not to look in the rearview mirror. And I’m kinda terrified of what will happen if I take my foot off the gas for too long.”

“We’re all going to die if we don’t keep living,” Mae said under her breath.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, nothing. Just something I said once.” She sighed and looked him in the eyes. “I get it, Casey. I do. I felt the same way after everything that happened in the mine. After I found out what happened to you. It was like I _had_ to keep on living, because that was the only way to make anything make sense. But I don’t think I’m very good at it.” She laughed bitterly. “No direction, too much guilt and fear and anger. Not much of a life around here. If it wasn’t for my friends, I’d have probably gone crazy by now.”

“Well,” Casey said slowly, “how ‘bout I’ll help you keep your sanity if you help me keep mine?”

She grinned, feeling a weird mix of embarrassed and uplifted. “Deal.”

“Your turn, partner in sanity,” Casey said. “Tell me about college.”

She hesitated. “It’s not a fun story…”

“Mae, you know you can tell me anything.”

And he was right, of course. If she could tell Gregg and Bea, she could tell Casey Hartley; Casey, who had been there when the Incident happened, who hadn’t been afraid of her afterward, who had defended her when she was bullied and relentlessly gossiped about for the rest of her high school years. Casey, who had always been there for her, who she had thought would never be there for her again. She didn’t have to hold a single thing back from this boy.

So she turned off the TV and stood up and said, “Let’s go upstairs.”

They went up to her attic bedroom – God, if she’d known Casey was coming over, she might have at _least_ picked her dirty clothes up off the floor – and she flopped down on the bed, and he lay down beside her, and she stared up at the cobwebs on the ceiling and told him what had happened to her at college. Every week spent trapped in her dorm, every class she flunked out of, every horrible thought that had passed through her brain. She held nothing back, because while she hated how pathetic and helpless it made her sound, it was the truth. And like she’d told Casey, she had long-since learned how little good it did to push every bad thing down and act like it had never happened. If it made Casey think less of her, if she had to endure his pity, then she would find some way to live with that, too.

“I’m terrified,” she confessed when she had finished, and her eyes began to well up with tears. “I want to be far away from this stupid, cursed town, but I’m scared that if I leave home, everything will get bad again. The whole world is fucking scary, but at least here I know _what_ to be scared of. So I’m just living with my parents, and I can’t hold down a fucking job, and I don’t have any future, and I’m just _trapped_. I’m trapped and I’m broken and one day I’m going to die, and I’ll have wasted my whole goddamn life.

“I used to be so naïve, even just like a year ago, when I first got back, I just wanted to be a kid again so I let myself be all stupid and impulsive and fuck around doing crimes with Gregg and pestering Bea and it felt _good_ , it felt safe and familiar, and then I found out about you. I went into that mine and I learned the truth, and ever since then, it takes me hours just to fall asleep at night. My thoughts keep spiraling, and everything feels like it’s about to end at any moment. Like if I go to sleep, I’m going to open my eyes again and the whole world will just be gone, and I’ll be alone. And then eventually I fall asleep anyway, and I wake up the next day and I’m tired and sad, but the world is still here, and I’m still here, and my friends are still here, and I tell myself that’s enough. But it was never enough, not really, because it was never complete. Because _you_ were gone. Gone forever.

She sniffed and blinked back tears and turned her head over to look at Casey lying next to her. His kind, green eyes stared back at her; there was nothing but compassion and understanding and love in them. “And then you came back, and for once it feels like the universe is giving me something instead of taking it away. Every time I look at you, I want to cry, because I’m just so goddamn happy that you’re here, Casey.” She smiled through the tears that were now streaking her cheeks. “I never knew it was possible to be so happy.”

Casey reached out and wiped a tear from her face, so tenderly that she froze stock-still, feeling like a fragile doll with cracks all along her surface. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone outside of her parents had touched her with such gentleness.

“Oh, Mae…” Casey breathed, less a sentence than an exaltation. “You’re not broken. And you’re certainly not alone. You’re scared to close your eyes and sleep? So am I.”

He sat up, and she sat up alongside him, unable and unwilling to look away from his eyes. “Everything feels so impermanent,” Casey said, “and I don’t want to lose it, or waste it, or take any of it for granted, ever again. I want to stay awake.” His hand brushed along her shoulder, down her arm, down to her own hand, which reached out for him, their fingers interlacing. His face was so close, so soft in the dim light, his eyes tender but serious. “I want to make the most of every moment.”

Mae felt transfixed, alive and electric and red-eyed and messy and short of breath and unable to move. Until she did.

She was kissing him before she knew what she was doing, leaning over and pressing her lips to his. For a second, he didn’t move, and then he responded, his mouth following her lead, each kiss like a drop of rain on parched lips, soft and sweet and life-sustaining.

She pulled back after a moment, just by a few inches, looking at his eyes in the warm lamplight. “Is this okay?” she whispered, and he smiled and whispered back, “Very, very okay.”

He wrapped his arms around her back, one hand on her shoulder, holding her tight against him. She ran her hand through the hair on the back of his head, pushing him gently down against the bed and leaning in and kissing him again. Their legs were getting tangled up together, his warm, solid chest beneath her. She placed a hand above his heart, and she could feel it beating out its beautiful rhythm, broadcasting to the world: _Alive, alive, alive._

She sat up, straddling his waist, and slipped her hands under the lip of his shirt, feeling his stomach and his ribs. He reached behind his neck and pulled his shirt over his head, throwing it off to the side. Mae took a moment just to stare unashamedly, admiring him beneath her. She put her hands on his shoulders and ducked her head back down for another kiss, only to pull away again after just a moment’s contact. Casey gave a little frustrated whine that seemed to activate something deep inside her, and she smirked and sat back up and mimicked his own movement from a second ago, pulling her shirt up over her head. She wasn’t as graceful at it as he was, though, and she got tangled up in the sleeves. She heard Casey laugh warmly, and then she felt his hands helping her, tugging the shirt up off of her body.

She blushed and grinned, feeling both exposed and exhilarated. “Thanks.”

He reached up and cupped the side of her face with his hand, and she gasped softly, even though his touch was gentle as ever. He smiled knowingly at her reaction. “You’re so beautiful, Mae.”

Before she could react to this, he pulled her down and over onto her back. He was on top of her in one fluid motion, propping himself up with his palms on the bed on either side of her face, grinning down at her. She reached up with her legs and wrapped them around his waist, holding him there, and pulled his face down to hers and kissed him, harder this time, fast and strong and hungry. He returned her intensity, and when she opened her mouth in a little moan, she felt his tongue slip inside it, touching the tip of her own tongue, exploring the roof of her mouth. She nibbled at his tongue lightly and playfully with her teeth, slipping her hand down to fumble with the button and zipper of her jeans. She then did the same with his, unbuttoning them and starting to pull his pants down; and, feeling emboldened, she reached inside between his pants and his boxers and gave him a little squeeze.

Casey broke away from their kissing and caught her wrist, pulling her hand away and holding her there. For a terrible split-second she thought he was upset with her, but when she looked at his face, she saw only hesitant uncertainty, mixed unmistakably with desire. “Do you have any…you know?”

She reached into her pants pocket and withdrew the pack of condoms, holding it up between her fingers with a mischievous grin. _I owe you one, Gregg._

Casey raised his eyebrows. “You came prepared.”

“Ready for anything.” All the tears and shame and anxieties she had poured out minutes earlier were forgotten now. Everything felt so good and right and exciting in this moment.

But Casey was still hesitating, a concerned frown on his brow. “And you’re sure this isn’t too fast?”

 _My sweet boy_. She stroked the side of his face with the back of her fingers, running down his jawline and brushing against his mouth. He shivered, his lips parting slightly. She said, in a soft whisper, “More like a long time coming.”

Casey smirked. “I’ll try not to end up being a short time coming, then.”

Mae laughed, and they both collapsed into each other in a fit of giggles. When she’d recovered, she rolled her eyes at him and said, “That was bad. Even I think so.”

“Sorry, bad jokes are part of the package. Can’t be helped. You’ve got to want all of me or nothing.”

“Well…” Mae said, her fingers trailing down his stomach. “I do want the _rest_ of the package…”

His eyes flicked to the door of her room. “We’re not gonna be interrupted, right? Or like, overheard?”

Mae put on her best Robocop impression and said in a monotone voice, “Come quietly or there will be…trouble.”

Casey snorted. “Now whose jokes are bad? I’ll try and keep it down, but…” He leaned in close, kissed her neck, and whispered into her ear with a smile, “No guarantees.”

They didn’t talk much for a while, after that, except for occasional, brief instructions and quick corrections. She mostly just held him against her, as tightly as she could and closer than she’d ever thought possible, welcoming him into her body and her heart, wrapped up in the miracle of their shared physicality.

She didn’t want to ever let go.


	14. Interlude: No Time to Forget

**Another scene, happening now:**

**It is halfway between sundown and dawn, and there is a house on a street with an attic bedroom, and inside it there are two little creatures, asleep in a bed barely big enough for them both, tangled in sheets.**

**One of them opens their eyes. They rise and dress, quiet as a cat. Then they sneak out of the room and down the stairs and out the front door. There is purpose in their movements, sharp and single-minded. They never once pause to look back.**

**They walk through the night and they do not feel the cold. They are seen by no one; every living thing slumbers. Every living thing but one.**

**Their feet take them to the woods at the edge of town, and then deep into the trees, to where an old mine entrance sits waiting like a black and gaping mouth. They go inside.**

**It is dark in the mine, but they do not stumble, and they do not get lost. The thing that guides their feet knows where it is taking them. Past the way to the elevator shaft, now blocked by fallen rubble. There are other ways down into the depths. Older ones: secrets carved into stone by long-dead miners who sang unearthly songs as they worked.**

**The sleepwalking little creature follows the twists and turns until they reach a dead-end passage blocked by a pile of rubble. They lift and push the stones aside, one by one, up against the walls, until only one large boulder still blocks the way. They put their shoulder to it and push until stone grinds against stone and the boulder moves to one side. They would not be able to move such a heavy thing unaided. They are much stronger together than when they were alone.**

**They slip through the passage hidden behind the boulder and they follow the ancient, winding stairs down into the dark. Their feet move carefully, one step at a time, because this body is so fragile, and so precious, and it would not do to be forced to abandon it underground, broken and lifeless.**

**Eventually they reach the bottom, or at least _a_ bottom; there are still much deeper depths below. The call is so much stronger down here, the song so much clearer. They follow it to its source, and there the little creature sits at the very edge of the great black hole, their legs dangling in thin air, and stares down into the void, listening to songs that only they can hear. A voice reverberates inside their mind, filling them, snaking through the passageways of their brain.**

**“Here,” the voice seems to say, “is what we will do…”**


	15. Bound for Glory

Mae woke up to rays of sunlight shining through her window, like she always did. She yawned, still half-asleep, and rubbed her eyes, like she always did. Unwilling to face wakefulness just yet, she rolled over, like she always did, and –

Oh. Right. This was new.

New, but not at all unwelcome. Casey Hartley was in her bed, fast asleep on his stomach, his face turned away from her and the sunlight through the window casting the orange fur of his back in a fiery glow. The sight almost took Mae’s breath away, and she forgot all about how tired she felt, or about the strange, half-remembered dream she’d been having. Memories of the night before came flooding back to her, and wow, oh _wow_ , that had really happened, hadn’t it?

It really had, and she had all the proof she needed right here with her. She reached out and softly stroked Casey’s back until he stirred. With a little groan, he shifted over and looked up at her, blinking, his eyelids still heavy with sleep. “Mmm…”

Mae smiled. “Good morning, sleepyhead. Did you have good dreams?”

“I don’t remember,” he muttered, his voice slurred. He sat up a little. “Is it really morning already?”

“It is.” She glanced at her clock. “8:08, to be precise.”

Casey flopped his head back down on the pillows. “So early…”

“Someone’s sleepy,” Mae said. She was exhausted, too, but she didn’t mention that – it was more fun to tease him than to sympathize. “You must have really worn yourself out last night.”

“Mhmm,” Casey murmured, his mouth pulling up in a tired smile. “I got some good exercise.”

Mae leaned in and kissed him. His mouth tasted like morning breath; she didn’t care. _Is this what love is?_ she wondered. _Wanting to kiss someone even when they really need to brush their teeth?_

It seemed like as good a definition as any to her.

“Want some breakfast?”

Casey’s stomach rumbled audibly, and he laughed. “Breakfast sounds great.”

“Okay.” She stood up and started looking around for something to wear. Had to be clean clothes around somewhere…

She stopped when Casey grabbed her hand and pulled her gently back toward the bed. “Doesn’t have to be right this instant…”

She climbed back into bed and snuggled up against Casey’s chest. He ran his fingertips in lazy little circles along her back, and she closed her eyes and relaxed.

Everything, at last, was perfect.

**\----**

And just like that, Mae had a new normal.

The hours turned into days and the days turned into weeks that were the happiest she’d had in years. Her days were filled with most of the usual activities – game nights at Angus and Gregg’s apartment; band practice twice a week; trampoline parties at Germ’s house; accompanying Bea while she ran errands for work; watching movies with her parents in the evenings. The difference – and it was a big one – was that Casey was there for most of it. They were practically inseparable. Not a day went by that they didn’t spend time together.

Gregg had, of course, nosily pressed her for details of that first night together, and since Mae couldn’t convincingly lie to save her skin, it soon became open knowledge that she and Casey had hooked up. Gregg was thrilled; Angus quietly proud; and her parents were supportive, seeming to accept the relationship as inevitable. Only Bea acted unenthused, but since very few things made Bea enthused, Mae tried hard to not hold it against her.

She suspected Bea was still a little jealous of how much of her time and focus was being devoted to Casey. And she tried, she really did, to make time for Bea as well, but she couldn’t help feeling slightly resentful. There was only one of her, and it wasn’t her fault that Bea didn’t get along with Casey. She just wanted them all to be able to hang out together, but aside from band practices, Bea seemed to be giving Casey a wide berth. And while Mae loved Bea a lot, she and Bea had gotten the past year to spend time together while Casey was…well, wherever he’d been while he was ‘dead.’ It didn’t seem unfair to her that she would make this new and most exciting element of her life a priority now, regardless of how Bea felt about him.

She said as much to Bea once after a particularly strained band practice, in which Bea showed up and did her part, but hardly said a word to anyone. While the boys were packing up, Mae had cornered her and asked, “How come you still don’t trust Casey?”

Bea had given her a sharp look in reply. “What makes you say that?”

“You barely ever talk to him. You try not to even look at him. I kissed him earlier after we finished playing Space Dragon and you actually turned your back so you wouldn’t have to see. Come on, Bea, I’m more observant than I look.”

“I…” Bea started to say. “Casey’s just kinda loud for me, you know? He makes Gregg even more hyper than usual. I don’t vibe easily with that kind of energy.”

Mae fixed her with a scrutinizing stare. “And?”

“And, um, I’m just stressed out right now. Things at work have been weird. Someone broke into the store and stole a bunch of shit the other night – boards and nails and things.”

“Don’t change the subject. That can’t be all there is to it. You were uncomfortable with Casey being back from the start.”

Bea shot a dark glance at the others and said under her breath, “It’s not Casey I don’t trust. It’s this miracle. He _came back from the dead_ , Mae. No way something like that doesn’t come at a price.”

“He’s fine, Bea. He hasn’t had any more seizures, and he’s been to his follow-up appointments and the doctors said he was in perfect health. There’s nothing to worry about!”

But Bea just looked at her in that pitying way that Mae hated and said, “Oh, Mae. What makes you think he’ll be the one to pay whatever the price is?”

“Whatever,” Mae said. “You’re being all morbid for no reason. Would it kill you to be optimistic for once?”

“I really do hope I’m wrong, Mae. For your sake.”

“Well, when you realize you’re wrong, then let’s talk,” Mae said, and stormed off back to Casey’s side.

And so Mae had decided not to bring up Casey around her. She really didn’t want to fight with Bea, but God, sometimes Bea didn’t make it easy to avoid.

Aside from Bea’s bad attitude, there was only one sour note in Mae’s day-to-day life, and that was the recurring dream she’d started having. She dreamed about wandering through that empty, starless desert almost every night. She didn’t encounter the God Cat again, though she was always keeping an eye out for it. She supposed its absence wasn’t that surprising; it had been pretty clear that it didn’t particularly _want_ to see her, and the desert seemed to be a vast place, big enough to wander around in for days without running into any other living things. If there even were other living things in there, besides her and the God Cat; she never saw anyone else, but whenever she was there, she always had the ‘goosebumps on the back of the neck’ sensation that accompanied being watched. It wasn’t exactly a nightmare – if anything, it got pretty boring after a while – but it always left her feeling drained when she woke up.

She didn’t tell Casey about her dreams – she told herself this was to protect him, to avoid triggering any bad memories. She occasionally probed him gently to see if he’d had any similar dreams, but he always claimed not to remember his after waking. Whether this was true or not, she couldn’t say, so she soon dropped the subject.

She still didn’t know whether the dream was ‘real’ in any sense, or just a creation of her own mind; the dreams felt so vivid and tangible when she was asleep, and yet so strange and surreal after waking, and so she could never be quite sure. She tried not to dwell on it; Mae had accepted the fact that her brain was always going to screw with her in some capacity, and weird dreams seemed harmless enough. As long as the waking world still felt real to her, feeling tired every morning was a small price to pay for a life that, in most respects, was better than she’d enjoyed in quite some time.

She may have still been trapped in Possum Springs, but that prospect didn’t seem so bad anymore with Casey around. And for the first time since returning home, she found herself seriously imagining the concept of a life beyond the borders of Deep Hollow County. A life, perhaps, with Casey by her side…

On the two-week anniversary of Casey’s return – two weeks that already felt like a whole year – Mae took him out to the truck in the field where she’d found him on Longest Night. It had been their secret place in years past, and now it held extra significance. So on an unseasonably warm winter day like that one, when they wanted to get away from other people and steal some private moments, they hiked out to that spot and cuddled in the truck bed, absorbing sunlight, breathing in fresh, crisp air, and filling their hearts with the simple joy of each other’s company.

“I’m so happy,” Mae said spontaneously. She’d been saying this a lot lately, because it was true, and the novelty of the feeling had not yet worn off.

“I’m happy that you’re happy,” Casey said with a smile, as he always did.

“Are _you_ happy, Casey?” Mae asked playfully. This, too, had become a routine for them.

He rolled over and kissed her on the cheek. “Never happier.”

She cuddled up against his chest, satisfied with the emotional check-in, and they stayed that way in comfortable silence for a time.

And then, unexpectedly, Casey spoke. “The first couple days, I was afraid there was something wrong with me.”

Mae perked up her ears and sat up, looking down at Casey intently. He hadn’t talked about this before. She thought they’d put the rocky start to his resurrection behind them.

“It wasn’t just the seizure and the amnesia,” Casey continued, “although those were scary, obviously. It was my senses. I couldn’t feel temperatures; I was never cold, but I wasn’t feverish, either. I couldn’t taste or smell anything. I had dinner with you and your parents, and I had to smile and pretend that it tasted good, when really it tasted like nothing. I thought for sure I was sick or something, but I didn’t _feel_ sick. I just felt…incomplete.”

“But you got better, right?” Mae questioned, concerned. “What changed?”

“I don’t know,” Casey said. “After that night when…when this started, between us, everything kind of just went back to normal.”

“What do you think it was, then?”

Casey shrugged. “Aftereffect of the seizure, maybe? But my point is...and I know this isn’t a real thing, certainly not like, a medical thing, but…it kinda felt like you cured me, Mae. Like you fixed me somehow. Made me feel whole again.”

“Dawww,” Mae said, grinning. “That’s the sappiest thing I’ve ever heard, dude. Telenovela-level romantic shit.”

Casey rolled his eyes. “I try to say something important and heartfelt and I get mocked for my trouble. I don’t know why I bother being in love with you, Mae Borowski.”

Mae’s heart did a little flip. _In love! IN!! LOVE!!!_

“Oh, no, no,” she hastened to say, “I’m into it. You’re extremely sweet. I’m just wondering what the rest of the world would think if they knew that too-cool-for-school skater boy Casey Hartley was a total softie.”

“Oh, god.” Casey gave an exaggerated groan. “Don’t tell anyone. I can’t let people know I’m soft!”

“Well, I see right through you,” Mae teased. “Can’t hide that big ol’ heart from me, Hartley.”

“Mae,” Casey said solemnly, “if I ever try and hide my heart from you, you might as well go ahead and rip it right out of my chest, because clearly I’m just misusing it.”

Mae stuck her tongue out. “Gross. Keep your icky heart inside your chest where it belongs.”

“Okay,” Casey laughed. “I’m just saying, it’s yours if you want it.”

“No! You need that to live, stop trying to give it away!!”

“It’s a metaphor, Mae,” Casey deadpanned.

“This is a no-metaphor zone. By the power invested in me as your partner, I am charging you with attempted Romance Crimes. One count of heart metaphors and one count of being mushy.”

Casey raised a playful eyebrow. “And what, exactly, is the punishment for such infrac-”

Mae hushed him with a finger on his lips. “Shut up and kiss me now.”

Some time later, when they’d had their fill of kissing (which always took a while), and as Mae lay there by Casey’s side watching the clouds drift through the sky, she built up the courage to ask the question that had been slowly growing in her mind. “Do you ever still think about hopping on a train one day and leaving Possum Springs?”

“Not if it meant leaving you behind,” Casey said, which sent both a wave of affection and a small stab of guilt through her heart – she had left him behind, once, and she still regretted it. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

“But I mean, like, if I came with you.”

Casey propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her with interest. “Is that what you want?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. There’s a big world out there, and I want to explore it. But not by myself. I don’t think I could cope – like literally couldn’t survive – all alone and far from home.”

“Yeah,” Casey said, and from his tone she could tell that he was remembering everything she’d told him about her ill-fated year at college. “But if you had a piece of home to take with you…”

“Exactly,” Mae said. “I wanted to go on a road trip or something with Bea, but she’s literally always busy, and it just became the kind of thing you always talk about and never do. But you and I aren’t busy. We don’t have responsibilities tying us down. We’re just surviving. And I don’t know about you, but I’d kinda like to try surviving literally anywhere else, just to prove to myself that I can. Maybe if I could do that, I could convince myself that a lot of other things are possible, too.”

“Hmm. Anywhere else does sound appealing.”

“I kinda hoped you would feel that way,” Mae said with a smile.

“You don’t mean right away, though, right? ‘Cause I don’t have a car. Or a job, or any money. Or really any marketable life skills necessary to get a job to get money to get a car.”

Mae sighed. “What a messed-up world it is, when you need to be employable just to run away from home.”

“We’ll figure something out. Maybe in the summer. Lotta folks out there, crusties and the like, living the nomad life in summertime. It’s tough but it’s doable.”

“Yeah,” Mae agreed. “One day. For now, I’m just happy to be wherever you are.”

He kissed her again and said, simply and sweetly, “Likewise.”

Mae watched as Casey clasped his hands behind his head and stretched, and as he did so, the sun came out from behind a cloud, its rays making his orange fur glow like golden fire again, and god, he was so beautiful. As long as she had Casey Hartley and the sun, she thought, this life wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was better than she’d ever thought she’d get or deserve. She didn’t have everything she’d ever wanted, but she had everything she needed for now: friends, family, mostly stable brain chemistry, and a boy who loved her. She was finally, thrillingly, happy.

She should have known it wouldn’t last.


	16. Last Seen

This is how the end started: with Mae waking up to a pounding headache and a knocking on her bedroom door. She groaned and struggled to pull her focus back to reality; she’d been having that dream again, the one in the God Cat’s vast, empty desert, and it always took her a minute to get her head together after waking.

Her laptop was lying open on the bed next to her, and when she brushed the mousepad and the screen turned back on, she saw that Demontower still running on it. She must have fallen asleep over the game; she remembered playing it the evening before, but nothing after that. She glanced at the bedside clock: It was almost 2 in the afternoon. Ugh, how had she slept in so long?

She thought for a moment that she had just imagined the knocking, and then her mother’s voice called through the door. “Mae, honey? Are you awake?”

“Yeah, Mom,” she called groggily. “I am now!”

“I need you to come downstairs,” her mom said, and something in her serious tone caught Mae’s attention. Something was wrong. “Your Aunt Molly is here and needs to talk to you.”

That was a surprise. What could Aunt Mall Cop possibly want with her? “Whatever it is, I didn’t do it!”

“Now, Mae,” her mom’s voice said, and then she heard her footsteps retreating down the stairs.

Grumbling, Mae rolled out of bed and pulled on some clothes. Oh god, all her muscles were stiff and sore, and her head was killing her. She was the only person she knew who could sleep into the afternoon and still feel less rested than she had the night before.

Right now her curiosity was outweighing her physical discomfort, though. She headed downstairs, gearing up to defend herself against whatever baseless suspicions had motivated Molly to come persecute her.

She could tell it was serious as soon as she saw everyone. Her parents were both sitting at the kitchen table along with Aunt Molly, and all three of them wore grave, worried expressions.

“What’s going on?” Mae asked. “Dad, why aren’t you at work?”

“We got a call while you were sleeping,” her dad said, “from Mr. Santello.”

“Bea’s dad? What’s he got to do with anything?” Mae questioned. “Why is Molly here?”

“Mae,” Molly said, “when was the last time you saw Ms. Santello?”

“Why?” Mae asked, feeling baffled and defensive. “Is Bea in trouble? Whatever you’re investigating, I’m sure she had nothing to do with it.”

“Mae, maybe you should sit down,” her mom said.

“No. I have the worst headache right now, so just spit it out already and tell me what’s going on.”

“ _Mae_ ,” Molly said firmly. “Beatrice Santello has gone missing. Her father never saw her return home to their apartment last night, and she didn’t show up to open her workplace for her scheduled shift this morning – which, according to her father, is highly unlike her.”

Mae blinked, stunned. “Bea’s missing?”

“Yes,” Aunt Molly said. “No one is in trouble here, Mae – I’m just trying to form a picture of Beatrice’s recent activity. So I’m going to ask again: When did you last see or speak to Ms. Santello?”

“Oh god,” Mae said. “Fuck, I don’t know.” Her head throbbed, and she rubbed her temples and tried to get everything straight in her mind. “Not yesterday. Maybe two – no, three days ago, at band practice. We had an argument, sort of.”

Molly took out a pocket notepad and pen and started writing something down. “What was the argument about?”

“Bea’s been unhappy that I’ve been spending so much time with Casey the last couple weeks. She and Casey don’t get along that well.”

Molly arched an eyebrow. “Oh? And why is that?”

“It’s…complicated. Casey came back into our lives and now she’s all jealous. I don’t know, I think she’s being unfair to him. I haven’t talked to her that much lately. I was waiting for her to come around and give Casey a chance.”

Scribbling notes, Molly added without looking at her, “Your parents tell me that you and Mr. Hartley are dating now, is that correct?”

“Ew,” Mae said, “don’t call him Mr. Hartley, it makes it sound like you’re talking about his dad.”

“Mae, focus, please. Answer the question.”

“Yes!” Mae said, throwing her arms up in the air. “Yeah, we’re dating. I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

“I’m just trying to get a clear picture,” Molly repeated. “When did you last see Mr. Hartley – I mean, Casey?”

“Yesterday,” Mae said. “We hung out with Gregg at his apartment. But then I went home for dinner. I played video games on my laptop for a while, and then I guess I fell asleep early. I remember I was really tired last night.”

“What time did you return home?”

“I don’t know, like…5 o’clock, I think?”

“Well before the end of your friend’s shift, then,” Molly observed. “She was working late. And you haven’t had any contact with Casey since parting ways yesterday? No messages?”

“No. Why do you keep asking about Casey? We need to find Bea!”

“Please, Mae,” her mom interjected. “Let Molly do her job.”

“Hmm,” Molly said, staring at her notepad and tapping the point of the pen against the paper. “To review: Last night, Beatrice was working late at The Ol’ Pickaxe, but failed to return home after closing the store for the night – or at least, if she did, her father didn’t see her. But he had been drinking and apparently fell asleep on the couch before the end of his daughter’s shift. Said he knew something was wrong right away when he woke up this morning because normally Beatrice would have been up at that time to make breakfast for them before leaving for work, but there was no sign of her.”

“Geez,” Mae said. “Taking care of her dad is practically Bea’s second job. She wouldn’t have ditched him like that unless something really bad had happened.”

She was getting worried now; dread was building in the pit of her stomach. Bea, ever busy, ever responsible, would never just up and skip out on her dad and her job. What could have happened to her? Mae’s brain fluttered around her biggest fear like a moth circling a flickering light bulb; but that couldn’t possibly be the answer. All the Black Goat cultists had been buried and left for dead in the mine – hadn’t they?

“Her father is very upset,” Aunt Molly added. “He told me that yesterday was the anniversary of his wife’s death, and now his daughter is missing…that poor man.”

“The anniversary…” Mae started to say. Holy shit, was it really? She’d had no idea that was yesterday, but then, Bea wouldn’t necessarily have told her. Or maybe she did mention it at some point and Mae had just forgotten. Either way, she felt suddenly guilty that she hadn’t been there for Bea on what had surely been a difficult day for her. And now she was missing, and Mae had no idea where to begin looking for –

Oh. Oh, of course; she felt like an idiot for not making the connection immediately. If Bea hadn’t gone straight home after work on the anniversary of her mom’s death, there was only one other place Mae could think of that she might have gone: Her mom’s grave.

She was about to say as much when Aunt Molly pushed her chair back and stood up. “Well,” she proclaimed, “I think it’s clear what the next step here is. I’m going to the Hartley’s place to speak to their son.”

“Wait, what?” Mae protested. “Why? I already told you Casey has nothing to do with this.”

Molly stared her down. “Respectfully, Mae, you don’t know that for sure. Unless you can account for his whereabouts last night?”

“No, but –” Mae spluttered. “You can’t possibly think he like, did something to Bea. That’s crazy! He wouldn’t do that!”

“Mae, kitten, calm down,” her father said. “No one is making any accusations yet.”

“Then why waste time questioning Casey?”

“Your father’s right,” Molly said firmly. “I’m not accusing your boyfriend of anything at this time. But maybe he saw Beatrice last night after you and he parted ways. Or maybe he knows someone who did. It can’t hurt to talk to him and get a picture of his movements – and if he has an alibi, then I can rule him out as a suspect. That’s how these investigations work; you question the people closest to the subject of the investigation first, gain as much information as you can, and use it to narrow down the list of possibilities.”

“Fine,” Mae said. “But if you’re going to see Casey, I’m coming with you.” She was champing at the bit to go check the graveyard for clues, but now she wasn’t sure she wanted Aunt Molly’s help. That was okay – she’d go with Molly to Casey’s, and then the two of them could follow up on Mae’s hunch together. If they found any evidence, they’d take it to the cops, and if not, then they wouldn’t have wasted anyone’s time.

“Mae,” her mom started to say, “Maybe it’s best if you stay here and let Aunt Molly –”

“No,” Molly said, giving Mae a scrutinizing look. “Perhaps you _should_ come along, Mae. Your boyfriend might be more willing to talk to you than to me.”

“Yeah…he doesn’t like cops much,” Mae said. _And neither do I, but if the cops can do something useful around here for once and help find Bea…_

“Well then,” Molly said. “Are you ready to go now?”

“Just give me one sec to run upstairs and message Gregg. He should know that Bea is missing. Maybe he can help us figure out who saw her last.”

“Okay, but don’t take too long. Time is of the essence in missing persons cases.”

“That’s true,” Mae’s mom added. “I’ve read books about it. They say that the odds of finding the person go down dramatically if they aren’t found within –”

“Don’t tell me the statistics, I don’t wanna know!” Mae said in a rush, running upstairs. “Be right back!”

Once back in her room, she hurried to close out Demontower and check her messages. As it happened, she already had some texts from Gregg from about an hour earlier:

_Hey duder. Fun hanging out yesterday. Have you talked to Bea lately? I was messaging her abt band stuff and she didn’t reply. Went by the Pickaxe and they said she hadn’t come in, which is weird bc skipping work is my thing not hers. Is she sick or something?_

Mae sent a hurried reply: _Bea’s missing! Aunt Mall Cop showed up at my house just now to ask me questions and stuff. We’re gonna go to Casey’s next and see if he knows anything helpful, even though he was probably just with you all last night, wasn’t he?_

Then she texted Casey: _Heads up, dude, my aunt and I are coming by your place, Bea is missing and I’ve been roped into the investigation. They are “eliminating suspects” and shit so just thought I should warn you!! Might need your help chasing a lead but we’ll talk about that after we get rid of Aunt Mall Cop. See you soon!_

By the time she’d finished typing that, Gregg had texted back: _Holy shit!!! Oh man we have to find her! idk if Casey saw her at all last night, but he actually bounced not long after you left, so maybe? It’s not like they would have been hanging out, though._

Mae replied: _Huh okay, well, I have a hunch about where she might have gone. Can you and Angus meet me and Casey at the graveyard in like an hour-ish? gtg now, Mall Cop’s waiting!_

Casey hadn’t seen her message yet, and she didn’t have time to wait. She paused just long enough to grab her self-defense switchblade off the bedside table and shove it in her pocket, and then she hurried back downstairs to where Molly and her parents were waiting.

“Ready to go, Mae?” Molly asked.

“Uh-huh!”

“Here, Mae,” her mom said, handing her a paper bag. “I know you haven’t had anything to eat yet today, so I threw some lunch together for you.”

With the shock of everything happening, Mae had barely noticed how hungry she was, but now her stomach rumbled audibly. “Thanks, Mom. You’re a lifesaver.”

“Call us if you need anything,” her dad said. “Good luck, kitten. We’ll be praying that Bea is safe and gets found soon, wherever she is.”

“Thanks, Dad.” She gave him a quick hug, and then turned to face Molly. “Okay, I’m ready. Let’s go.”

 _I will find you, Bea,_ she thought to herself grimly as they headed out the door. _I promise. Even if I have to turn over every stone in Deep Hollow County, I will find you._


	17. Investigations

Mae and her aunt didn’t speak much on the way to Casey’s house. Molly seemed to be holding off on further questioning for the moment, which suited Mae fine; the intensity of her headache was slowly lessening, but it still hurt, so she spent most of the drive quietly eating the lunch her mom had packed while she tried to ignore the pain and think through what might have happened.

Despite an abundance of less frightening – if no less dreadful – possible explanations, she kept coming back to the same, sinking fear: What if the cultists they had buried in the mine weren’t the only ones? But then, if this _was_ some form of retribution, why had it been so long in coming? Or could this be the start of some new wave of sacrificial kidnappings at the hands of a new group of followers? Could someone else have discovered the Black Goat and started the cycle anew?

She wished she could confide in Molly about all of it, but even if she decided her aunt was trustworthy, there was no way of knowing if the same could be said of the rest of the Possum Springs police department. She had stopped looking over her shoulder as time had passed without incident, but now all her old paranoia was creeping back up to the surface. If she was going to figure out what was going on, she would have to do so without putting her trust in strangers.

When they turned into the Hartley’s driveway and approached the house, Mae saw Casey sitting on the porch bench, waiting for them. When the police car pulled up and Molly cut the engine, he stood and approached them.

Mae hopped out of the car and hurried towards him, leaving the door open behind her. “Casey…”

But her aunt was following hot on her heels. “Mr. Hartley? I’m Officer Molly –”

“Yeah,” Casey interrupted, “I know who you are. You’re Mae’s aunt.”

“That’s right. I don’t believe we’ve been formally introduced, though.”

“Meaning no offense, ma’am,” Casey said coolly, “but as a general rule, I try to avoid situations that formally introduce me to officers of the law.”

Molly raised an eyebrow. “Are your parents home, Casey?”

“They’ve got jobs. Just me here right now. “What’s this all about, officer? Something I can help you with?”

“Just need to ask you a few questions. Won’t take long.”

“Would you like to come inside?”

“If you’d be so kind,” Molly said.

“Yes, ma’am. Right this way.”

As he led them into the house, Mae leaned in close to Casey and whispered, “Sorry about all this.”

He briefly put his arm around her and gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “S’okay, Mae.”

They sat down at the kitchen table; Casey and Mae on one side, Molly on the other.

“I’ll get right to it,” Molly said. “Beatrice Santello has gone missing, as of last night. I believe you know her?”

“Not well, but by association. We’re in a band together, but she’s more Mae’s friend than mine.”

Molly gave him a shrewd look. “You don’t seem very surprised to hear that she’s missing.”

Mae shared a quick glance with Casey, feeling suddenly like she had made a mistake by robbing him of the chance to show Molly a genuine reaction to the news. “Uh, I may have told him already.”

Casey nodded in confirmation. “She may have given me a heads up about the situation, before you headed over here.”

Molly gave Mae a withering look that made it clear she regretted bringing Mae with her, but then she sighed and carried on. “Casey, can you recount for me your whereabouts yesterday?”

“Sure. I spent the afternoon at Gregg’s apartment hanging out with him and Mae. Cold day out, not much to do, so we were just staying in and playing video games.”

“And Mae left before you, is that right?”

“Yeah, about quarter to 5. I headed home not long after. Wanted to bike back before it got dark.”

“So neither of you were anywhere near the vicinity of Beatrice Santello’s workplace that night?”

Casey shook his head. “I wish I could be of more help, officer, but I didn’t see or speak with Bea at all yesterday.”

“Mae tells me that you and Beatrice don’t get along that well,” Molly pressed.

“Like I said, she’s more Mae’s friend than mine. I have no problem with her, though. She’s a little snippy sometimes, but we don’t fight or anything. To be honest we mostly just leave each other alone. I rarely ever see her outside of band practice.”

Mae noticed he seemed a bit tense, though. He was sitting straight-backed and square-shouldered with his hands palms-down on the table, and the way he spoke was more formal and rigid than she was accustomed to. She couldn’t blame him for that, though; if Molly had been a stranger instead of a relative, Mae might have felt a bit intimidated by her, too. Neither of them were inclined to feel comfortable with authority figures – they could thank a misspent youth of minor criminal activity for that.

“Listen, though,” Casey added. “I’m as worried about Bea as anyone. She might not exactly be my friend, but she’s close with Mae here, and I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to someone Mae cares for. So I hope you find her, and if there’s anything more I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Hartley,” Molly said. “But for right now, I just need to verify your whereabouts at the time Beatrice was last seen. Do you have an alibi that someone can attest to?”

“My parents will confirm that I was here all evening last night,” Casey added, “if you’d like to call or stop by again later once they’re home?”

“I think I’ll do that, Casey. Thank you for your time.” Molly stood up. “Do you need a lift back into town, Mae?”

“Oh! No, that’s okay,” Mae told her. “I think I’m gonna stay here with Casey.”

“Very well then,” Molly said, and handed her a business card. “This has the station’s number on it. You call if you think of anything that could help us find Bea. And I’ll call your house and let your family know if we turn up anything on our end.”

“Thanks, Aunt Molly.”

Mae waited until the sound of her aunt’s police car had vanished into the distance before moving into the living room and sitting down on the couch with her face in her hands. Her head was still hurting, and she felt dizzy, and she was worried about Bea. Everything felt fragile, like she had little fault lines all across her, one jolt away from shattering.

Casey sat down next to her and gently put an arm around her. She leaned into him and rested her head against his.

“You okay?” Casey asked.

Mae took a long breath in and out, fighting back the unhelpful urge to cry from the stress she was feeling. “Better now that I’m with you,” she said in a quiet voice. “Thanks for being a good sport about that.”

“I’m not afraid to talk to a cop,” Casey assured her. “Especially when it’s to help a friend. Besides, your aunt’s not _that_ scary.”

Mae sniffed, dabbing at her eyes with the back of her fingers. She appreciated Casey’s attempt to lighten the mood, but she couldn’t bring herself to laugh. “What do you think could have happened to Bea?”

“I don’t know,” Casey said seriously. “But we’re going to find out, okay? Speaking of, didn’t you say in your text that you had a lead?”

“Yeah,” Mae said, sitting up and shaking the cobwebs loose from her head. “What time is it?”

Casey pointed to a clock on the living room wall. “Quarter to 3, looks like.”

Mae stood up from the couch, against the protests of her tired body. “You should get your bike. We need to head to the graveyard right away.”

“What’s at the graveyard?”

“A hunch. And I told Gregg and Angus to meet us there, so we should get going.”

“Perfect,” Casey said. “We’ll find her together. All of us. We’ll search all day if we have to.”

“Casey…” Mae said hesitantly. “I’m really trying not to assume the worst, but given past experiences with people suddenly going missing in this town…there’s a chance this could be related to, you know. What happened to you.”

Casey blinked. “Oh.”

“Yeah. So like, we need to be careful. Because if it was one of those…those people, then they know who we all are, and it wasn’t a coincidence that they took Bea.”

“Hang on,” Casey said. “I’ll be right back.”

He ducked into a room down the hall, leaving Mae staring after him in confusion, and returned a moment later stuffing something into his backpack.

“What were you getting?” Mae asked.

“My dad keeps a handgun in the bedroom. Bet he won’t even notice it’s missing.”

Mae’s eyes went wide. “You’re bringing a _gun_?”

“What?” Casey said, looking confused by her alarmed expression. “You said we should be careful. These cult fuckers you told me about already got the drop on me once. They’re not doing it again.”

Suddenly Mae felt a bit unprepared; the most dangerous weaponry she possessed was the little switchblade in her pocket. “Do you even know how to use a gun?”

“Of course I do. Remember shooting cans with my BB guns out back when we were kids? I’ve always been a good shot.”

“But that’s…different…?”

Casey shrugged. “Not really? It’s just point and shoot, Mae.”

Mae didn’t know how she felt about the idea of Casey packing heat. Okay, she knew how she felt about it in _theory_ (it was hot as hell), but in practice, the idea of having a loaded gun around didn’t really make her feel safer – just more nervous.

She didn’t say as much, though. Casey wouldn’t understand – he hadn’t been shot at by the aforementioned ‘cult fuckers’ once. She could still remember the frighteningly loud bang of the rifle, and feeling a bullet whizz past her head, right before she fell. But she didn’t want to fight about it, and anyways, they didn’t have time. “Okay, fine, you can bring a gun.”

“I don’t remember asking for permission,” Casey said pointedly. He stepped forward and did that thing that always made her melt where he took her by the shoulders and made direct eye contact. “Whatever’s going on, I’m going to keep us safe, Mae. I promise.”

Mae gulped, blushing a little under the intensity of his gaze, and then leaned in and gave him a quick kiss. “I believe you.”

“Oh! Just realized, I’ve got something you might want to take, too,” Casey said. He went to open a closet in the hall, and after a moment of rummaging through it, returned with a baseball bat.

“Yours?” Mae questioned. “I didn’t know you played.”

“Haha, no, this is also my dad’s. Keepsake from his younger days. Old but sturdy.”

She took the bat and gave it a test swing or two, familiarizing herself with the weight and feel of it. “Aw yeah, this is more my speed. Could probably heck a guy up with this if I had to.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to that. Now let’s get going, yeah? We have a friend to find.”

It was amazing, really, the way Casey made her feel like everything could be okay. Part of her, the small part that clung to hope, almost believed it.

But the memory of a calm, purring voice reverberated unbidden in her mind. _There are forces at play that are beyond your understanding, little creature._

She shivered, her head throbbing, as she followed Casey out into the cold.

**\----**

Mae hadn’t been to the Possum Springs Cemetery since the ghost hunt. She remembered feeling creeped out by the foggy graves and leafless trees, but kind of in the fun, thrilling way. That had been before she’d realized how much danger she was really in – and besides, it had been hard to be too scared with Bea’s stoic, sensible presence at her side.

She wished Bea was there with her now. Maybe then she would have had room inside her to feel something besides a mounting sense of dread.

By the time she and Casey arrived, Gregg and Angus were already waiting for them, their bikes parked just inside the front gate.

Casey pulled up alongside them and he and Mae hopped off the bike. “Gregg. Angus. Good to see you.”

“Back at you, dude,” Gregg said.

Angus’ kind face was lined with worry. “Wish it was under better circumstances.”

“Thank you guys so much for dropping everything like this,” Mae said, giving them each a quick hug.

“What,” Gregg said indignantly, “you thought I would just sit on my ass at the Snalcon while Bea’s missing somewhere?”

“Obviously not,” Angus added. “Obviously we’re going to find her.”

“So what’s the plan, Mae?” Casey said, urgency in his voice. “Time’s a-wasting here.”

“Right. Follow me.”

She led them through the rows of graves and down the hill. The cemetery was empty and silent, with no sign of either groundskeeper or grave visitors, and yet Mae couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. She had her head on a swivel, hyper-aware of her surroundings, but nothing out of the ordinary caught her eye.

“Where are we going?” Gregg asked.

She pointed at the grave sitting alone in a little depression at the bottom of the hill. _Still there. Sinkholes haven’t gotten it yet._

Angus approached the headstone and examined it. “Oh. Oh my, this…this is…”

“Bea’s mom,” Mae confirmed. “She took me here once. Look at the date of death.”

“That was yesterday,” Angus said, realization dawning in his voice. “Oh man…”

“Bea went missing on the anniversary of her mom’s death?” Gregg said.

Mae nodded vigorously. “She worked a full day at the Pickaxe but didn’t go home right after. Where else would she have gone on that particular day, if not here?”

“So, what is it we’re supposed to be looking for?” Gregg questioned.

“I dunno. Clues, I guess. Anything that proves Bea was here.”

“You mean like this?” Casey called out.

He was standing near the grave, pointing at something half-visible in the grass. It was muddy and squished, like it had been stepped on, but nonetheless a familiar object. Bea never left home without a fake cigarette between her teeth.

“This was hers,” Mae said, feeling her stomach drop as she looked at it. She felt like she might be sick. “She was here and she dropped it and it’s just been…sitting here…”

“Hey, Mae,” Casey said, a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Keep it together.”

“Mae,” Angus said, “I don’t want to upset you, but I think you should see this…”

She pulled away from Casey and turned to look at where Gregg and Angus were standing, examining the ground behind the grave, at the foot of the hill leading back up from the hollow. “What is it?”

Angus pointed. “See those marks?”

The light was soft and grey through the clouds, and Mae’s eyes were tired and blurry, but when she blinked and looked closer, she could see it – flattened grass, and under it, ruts in the mud, like something – or someone – had been dragged up the hill.

The world seemed to spin a little. “Oh god. Oh god, it was her, it had to have been. Someone…someone took her.”

“This is bad,” Gregg said. “What if whoever did this was waiting for us to figure it out? They could be here right now!”

Casey frowned. “That sounds a little paranoid, buddy.”

“Case. Come on. If this is what it looks like, you more than any of us should know how dangerous these people can be.”

“There’s four of us. If we’ve got a stalker-type situation, they’d be stupid to make a move.”

“But we don’t know if this was one guy, or a bunch of ‘em, or what!”

“How would anyone even know Bea was going to be here last night?” Casey pointed out.

“Maybe they didn’t,” Gregg argued. “Maybe they followed her here from work. It’s not that far. They could have been watching and waiting until she was alone.”

“Mae,” Angus asked, “what’s at the top of that hill?”

“I think just more graves?” Mae said. “I’ve never been over there before.”

“I’m going to check it out,” Casey offered. “See where the trail leads. You three stay together and wait here.”

“Are you sure we should be splitting up right now?” Angus asked.

“I’ll be fine, buddy. I won’t go far. And I can protect myself if have to.”

He turned to go, but Mae called out, “Wait. Can I have the bat first?”

The handle of the baseball bat was sticking out of the top of Casey’s backpack. He knelt and removed it and handed it to Mae. “There you go.”

“Thanks.” Just holding it in her hand made her feel better. Stronger, somehow, even though she still felt light-headed.

Gregg looked at the weapon in her hand with some envy. “Mae, you still got that knife I gave you?”

She patted her pocket. “Got it right here.”

“Knife and a bat. Better than nothing, I guess. Man, I wish I still had my crossbow.”

“It’ll be okay, Bug,” Angus said. “I’ll protect you.”

“Awww, Cap’n, you would do that for me? Even if it meant doing a violence?”

“I will do a violence for you if I have to. Maybe even more than one violence.”

Mae tried to picture Angus in a fight, but the thought just made her feel sick to her stomach with fear. They had gotten off easy last time – that one guy, Eide, had jumped her on the way out of the mine, but none of them had been seriously injured. The rest of the cult had let them just walk away. But this time, it felt different. Bea’s kidnapping felt like a message: _None of you are safe_.

She began to feel dizzy, and suddenly her head was pounding like her brain was trying to break free of her skull. She groaned and sat down, slumped against the back of Bea’s mother’s headstone. “Aggghhh…guys, I don’t feel good…”

“Mae!” Gregg was by her side in seconds. “Mae, you okay?”

“Ughhh…no. Head hurts…” Her vision was getting fuzzy, and for a second, she thought she blacked out and saw stars. She hadn’t felt like this since…since…oh God.

While the others stood over her, she heard Casey’s voice call out, “Drag marks lead up the hill and then stop at the top. Footprints go from there to the fence and then disappear. Don’t know how anyone could have gotten over it while carrying Bea. Weirdly small footprints, too, for…hey, what’s going on?” He hurried over and knelt down beside her. “Mae! Mae, what’s wrong?”

“Uhhh,” Mae groaned, reaching for his hand. “Help me up.”

Casey helped pull her to her feet, and she put an arm around his side and leaned against him until her head stopped spinning. Gregg and Angus were watching in concern.

“Guys…” she said finally. “I know where Bea is. I know where we have to go.”

“Don’t say it,” Gregg whimpered. “Don’t fucking say it.”

She looked around at all of them; Gregg, visibly scared; Angus, worried but determined; Casey, grim-faced but with anxiety hiding behind his eyes. Her friends, her loved ones, who had saved her so many times in so many ways. Bea should have been among them, and if there was any chance that she could still be saved, Mae could do no less for Bea than her friends had all once done for her.

“I’m sorry, but we don’t have any choice. We have to go back to the mine.”


	18. The Old, Old Things Down Here

Mae stared into the yawning void of the mine’s mouth, trying to ignore the feeling that something in that darkness was staring back. She could feel it, now that she was closer than she’d been since that night the previous year. Even up here, though hundreds of feet of stone and earth, she could hear the song tickling the back of her brain, like the ghostly echoes of a half-forgotten sound.

She fought down her growing nausea and gripped the handle of the baseball bat more firmly in her hand.

“You sure you want to do this?” Gregg said. He and Casey were standing beside her, Angus hanging back slightly.

“Of course I don’t,” Mae admitted. “But we’ve done it before.”

“Yeah,” Angus said, “and we were lucky to walk out in one piece!”

“Guys. Bea’s down there somewhere. I know she is.”

Gregg swallowed and said hesitantly, “Is she…did they…?”

“I don’t know. But that…that thing is still there, too. I can feel it.”

Casey took her hand and gave it an encouraging squeeze. “I’ve got your back. You can do this.”

Just at that moment, Mae felt like it was all she could do to stand up, but she clung tight to Casey’s hand and tried to absorb as much second-hand confidence from him as she could. She turned to him and said, “Casey?”

“Yeah, Mae?”

“Listen, whatever happens down there…I love you. I just want you to know that.”

“I know you do,” Casey said, and gave her a quick kiss. “I love you, too.”

“Cool,” Gregg interrupted. “We all love each other, good to know. Now that we’ve established that, can we please get this over with?”

They stepped forward, with determination and trepidation in equal measure, and entered the mine. Mae and Casey led the way, carrying flashlights they had picked up from Gregg and Angus’ apartment on their way through town. Gregg had his knives in his jacket pockets. Casey had the gun in his backpack, Mae had the bat and the switchblade, and Angus…well, Angus wasn’t one for weapons, but Mae didn’t doubt he could throw a punch if he had to.

Maybe they’d get lucky and whoever had taken Bea wouldn’t be there. Maybe they could get in and out unnoticed. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

“I don’t know that we’ll even get very far, you know,” Angus said after a moment of walking through the dark. “Last we checked, the elevator was broken and the mineshaft caved in.”

“I think there’s another way down,” Mae said. “Just follow me.”

“What?” Gregg said, stopping in his tracks. “How do you know?”

She turned around to look at him, shining the flashlight in his face and making him wince and cover his eyes. “I can’t explain it. It’s like…I think I saw it in a dream, maybe? But I know where I’m going, or like, I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Sounds like a great way to get lost in a mine!”

“Just trust me, Gregg. Please.”

“We do, Mae,” Casey told her. “Come on, lead the way.”

They kept walking, and it felt to Mae like the air got colder with every step. She shivered, letting her feet guide her, rather than her brain. She truly couldn’t explain how she knew which way to go – except that she could still faintly hear that strange song in her head, and it seemed to be louder and clearer when she faced in the correct direction. Her head still ached, and her legs felt heavy, but she led them further down the mine’s dark passageways, one step at a time.

Eventually, they came to what she thought at first glance was a dead end: A large boulder stood against a wall of solid rock at the end of the corridor. Other, smaller stones lay heaped against the walls of the passage like piles of raked leaves.

“Great,” Gregg said. “So much for your uncanny sense of direction.”

“No, hold up, Bug,” Angus said, and stepped closer to the boulder. “Someone’s been here. Look at the rocks – it’s like someone moved them. Casey, give me some light.”

Casey shone the flashlight at the end of the corridor, and suddenly they all saw it – a half-exposed hole in the wall behind the stone.

“Think we can all fit through there?” Gregg questioned.

“You can, no problem,” Angus said. “It’ll be a tight squeeze for me, but I think I can make it through.”

“Okay, one at a time, then,” Casey said. “I’ll go first.”

Before anyone could object, he slipped through the gap between the boulder and the wall and pushed through the hole, ducking his head. “Nothing to it,” he said from the other side, shining his flashlight back at the others. “Now you, Mae.”

Mae took a deep breath, and then pushed through the hole after Casey. He reached out and took her arm when she got close enough. “Easy. There you go.”

Gregg followed, and then, with a bit of effort, Angus. They were in a narrower corridor now, the stone ceiling almost low enough to graze the top of Angus’ hat.

“Everyone here?” Casey said. “Great. So far, so good. Where to next, Mae?”

“I…” Mae murmured, leaning against the wall.

“You okay, dude?” Gregg said.

“Yeah…just…air’s getting so stuffy down here.” At least she hoped that was the only thing making her light-headed, but she knew it probably had more to do with the song echoing through her mind. It sounded stronger now. Impatient.

“Let’s go get Bea and get the hell out of here,” she said, pulling herself together.

They walked down the passage, shining the flashlights at the ground, until suddenly Casey flung an arm out in front of Mae, halting her in her tracks. “Woah!”

“What?” she asked, and then bit her tongue, because she had just noticed what he had seen a second earlier: The tunnel ended a few steps ahead of them, and with it, so too did the ground. A dark vertical shaft hung before them. It was a patch of shadow in a world of darkness; had they not had flashlight beams to illuminate the ground, they would have walked right off the edge before realizing their fatal mistake.

They edged cautiously forward and shone their flashlights down the shaft. There was no elevator; instead, a set of steep, winding stone stairs hugged the walls, heading steadily downward. Even at the best of times, just looking down into that hungry darkness would have made Mae feel wobbly. The thought of actually descending those stairs in her current condition terrified her.

She turned to Casey. “If I go first, will you like, keep a hand on me, keep me steady?”

“I’ve got you,” Casey said. “Gregg, Angus, you guys gonna be okay following us?”

“Oh, no problem,” Gregg said. “I descend terrifyingly steep, dark staircases into the bowels of the Earth all the time. I’m not at all afraid of plummeting to my death. In fact, I could do this with my eyes closed.”

“Hey, Gregg,” Mae said weakly. “Too bad you didn’t die in a freak tunnel collapse while squeezing through that gap back there.”

“Too bad a sinkhole didn’t open up under your feet back in the graveyard.”

“Too bad you didn’t crash your bike on the way here and get run over by a car.”

“…” There was a brief pause, and then Gregg said, “Okay, actually can we maybe not joke about death right now?”

Geez. Mae knew things were serious when even their usual ‘too bad’ bit couldn’t cheer him up. “Sorry, dude.”

“It’s okay, dude. Pass me and Angus one of those flashlights and let’s get this over with.”

They proceeded carefully, step by step, holding hands and keeping their feet as far from the edge as the narrow stairs would allow. The steps were rough and unevenly sized, and the descent was harrowing at first; Mae felt certain that at any moment she would slip and fall into nothingness. But gradually, as they kept going, it started to feel more doable, until Mae could almost pretend she was just walking down a normal set of stairs – provided she kept her focus on her feet and not on the empty chasm looming to her right.

She would have killed for a handrail, but instead she just held on tight to Casey’s hand. They matched each other’s pace, and his step never wavered. She didn’t understand how he wasn’t scared stiff, but his courage was practically the only thing keeping her moving.

Well, that and her need to save Bea. She couldn’t let herself think about what she’d do if they were too late. _Please, God, or whatever’s out there watching…please don’t let Bea have died thinking that I’m mad at her. Please let her be okay._

The slow, careful journey down was long enough that Mae began to lose track of time. Had they been moving down these steps for 10 minutes? 20? An hour? She couldn’t tell. But eventually, just when it had started feeling like there was no end to the stairs, they reached the bottom.

“Oh thank God,” Mae breathed, stepping away from the others and taking a moment just to appreciate being able to stop hugging the wall and move around without fear of falling.

But just when she was catching her breath and feeling her anxiety subside a little, a sudden stab of pain in her head brought her to her knees. “Aaagghh!”

“Mae!” shouted her friends, almost in unison, but the voices sounded distant and fuzzy. Another, more immediate voice had subsumed them, and its song was loud and terrible. She felt like her brain was going to liquefy and leak out her ears any second.

And then she felt Casey’s arms wrapped around her from behind, holding her close, and his whispered, urgent voice in her ear pierced right through the pain. “Mae, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“It’s…here…” she gasped. “And it’s…waiting for me…”

“Can you walk?” Angus asked.

“I think so…” she said quietly, staggering unsteadily to her feet and leaning on Casey for support.

“Let’s go finish this,” Gregg said, a note of anger in his voice. “I will personally kick this thing’s ass for hurting you.”

Mae smiled, but before she could express her thanks, a familiar, raspy voice echoed from the end of the corridor. “Gregg? Is that you?”

Mae gasped. “Bea!” Before she knew what she was doing, she grabbed the flashlight from Casey and shot off in the direction of Bea’s voice. The others shouted and ran after her, but she ignored them, just as she did the pain in her head. _Bea’s here! She’s alive!_

She burst into the adjoining room, swinging her flashlight around and quickly taking in her surroundings: Big, round room, high ceiling, an empty passageway on the far wall. Through it she could see the reddish glow of a lantern, illuminating a familiar outcropping, and all of a sudden she knew where she was standing: On the other side of the great pit in the ground, where the cultists had once gathered to face them.

There was very little time for that realization to sink in, however, before her eyes fell on the structure in the left-hand side of the chamber.

It was a simply constructed cage, makeshift but sturdy; a skeleton frame of wooden boards nailed together, with wooden pallets for the ceiling and floor, more vertical boards along the sides forming bars, and a door on hinges, locked shut with a padlock. It was low-ceilinged but wide, large enough to hold several people, and inside it, staring at Mae through the boards with a look of fear on her face, was Bea.

“Mae! Oh God, what are you doing here?”

“Bea! Thank goodness!” Mae rushed over to the cage and started pulling on the lock, but Bea flinched and shrank back against the far wall.

“Stay back!” she rasped hoarsely.

Mae blinked, confused. “What? Bea, I came to save you! Don’t worry, we’ll get this door open. Casey can shoot the lock off if he has to. I’m so glad you’re okay. You’re not hurt, are you? Did you see who did this to you? Are they still here?”

“I don’t understand…” Bea’s voice was soft and scared, and when Mae glanced up from the lock to look at her, her friend’s eyes were wide with fear and confusion.

“Bea, it’s okay, don’t be afraid. We’ll protect you. I won’t let anyone hurt you again!”

Before her eyes, Mae watched as Bea’s expression changed from bewilderment to angry, hostile disbelief.

“Mae, you’re the one who put me in here to begin with!”

It was as though the ground had just fallen away from her. All of a sudden she felt like she was floating, destabilized and unmoored, with nothing to hold on to. “Wh-what? No, I didn’t! I –”

“Yes, you did, Mae! I was at the graveyard visiting my mom, and you just showed up out of nowhere and hit me over the head with a bat. The next thing I knew, I was waking up here in this…this cage, in the dark, and you were locking the door.” Her voice wavered, thick with a combination of anger and horror. “I tried to talk to you, but you – you just walked away and _left me down here_!”

Mae was speechless. “It wasn’t…I – I wouldn’t…Bea, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but that wasn’t me!”

 ** _“Yes, it was. But you did not do it alone.”_** The voice from behind her was familiar but distorted – a cutting hiss that sounded impossibly loud in the quiet stillness of the cave. Or maybe it just felt so loud because of the way the words echoed in her brain, sung back to her in the speaker’s native tongue, dripping with malice.

For a moment, her heart skipped a beat and her blood ran cold. She turned, slowly, dreading what she somehow knew she was about to see.

As Mae shone the beam of her flashlight across the room, she saw Angus’ unmoving body lying face down on the ground. In front of him, Casey stood holding a struggling Gregg in a headlock, handgun pressed to his friend’s temple. He didn’t even blink when the flashlight’s beam hit his face. His lips were pulled back in a grotesque smile, and his eyes were pitch black, reflecting none of the light shining on them.

Mae’s heart was beating like a jackhammer now. _Oh no. Oh no no no no._ “C-Casey?”

 ** _“What’s wrong, Mae?”_** the thing that moments ago had been Casey Hartley said, in a voice like a knife sliding across bone. **_“You told me you wanted it to hurt.”_**


	19. When I Die

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recommended listening for this chapter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7Knc3l8l9o

Mere seconds. Just an instant, really. That’s how long it took for Mae’s world to be turned upside down.

She dropped her flashlight in shock, its light casting tall shadows against the opposite wall as she stared open-mouthed in horror at Casey Hartley. Subconsciously, her mind quickly took in a wealth of disturbing information: the unnatural darkness of his eyes; the unfamiliar tension in the way he held himself; the distorted whisper of his voice, like a creature hiding inside his throat was speaking through his mouth. All of these things painted a disturbing picture, but she needed none of them to understand what she was looking it. She had met this thing before, and heard its voice echoing through her head. She knew its name, and it knew hers.

But she had never expected to confront it like this, wearing the face of someone she loved and holding a gun to a second loved one’s head.

She tightened her grip on the baseball bat with one hand, and with the other arm she slowly raised a shaking hand and pointed behind Casey at Angus’ prone form. “Oh God, Angus…is he…d-did you?” Her mouth was dry, and her voice came out as a croak.

“He hit him on the head with the gun, Mae! I couldn’t stop him!” Gregg said. He sounded panicked, his eyes wide and welling with tears.

 _Good,_ Mae thought, with a strangely calm rationality. _Angus is still alive. That’s good. I can do this. I won’t let anyone die down here._

But then Casey pressed the barrel of the gun harder against Gregg’s skull, and Gregg gave a strangled whimper, and Mae felt panic roughly squeeze her heart.

“Casey, man,” Gregg choked out, “w-why are you doing this?”

“He’s not,” Mae said in a hushed voice. “That’s not Casey.”

 ** _“This is true,”_** the thing wearing Casey said. Its voice seemed to change from word to word; one moment a creak like old door hinges, the next a deep reverberating drone, or a crackling hiss like static on a radio. **_“Do you know my name, little creature?”_**

Mae’s dry throat closed up, as though her body was fighting to avoid speaking the name, but she forced the words out in a whisper. “Black Goat.”

The thing gave a terrible, bubbling laugh that echoed off the walls and stabbed at Mae’s ears like needles. Every hair of her fur was standing on end, and her skin felt like it wanted to crawl off her body and hide in the shadows.

**_“That is one of my names. I have had many, in languages forgotten and tongues unpronounceable in this form.”_ **

“We’ve met before,” Mae said, struggling to keep her voice from wavering. “I just couldn’t understand you then.”

This prompted another brief peal of stomach-churning laughter. **_“You cannot understand me now, tiny thing of Earth. But now I can come to you in a familiar form and speak in your words.”_**

“Then let’s talk. Just let go of Gregg first. You don’t have to threaten him like that. We both know you’re not going to shoot him.”

**_“You are certain of this?”_ **

“Yes.” It was a gamble, but it made sense. It was the only bit of hope her mind had managed to grab hold of.

**_“Why?”_ **

Mae gulped, her breathing fast and shallow, fighting back the anxiety that was threatening to give her a panic attack. “Because you like your food to still be alive when you eat it.”

Casey’s face twisted into a hideous smile. He released Gregg, shoving him forward to stagger into Mae’s arms. Mae held her friend tightly, protectively, as he cried into her shoulder. She felt about ready to fall to pieces herself, but she couldn’t afford to. Once, she had walked into this mine and talked with Black Goat and managed to leave intact. She knew that she wouldn’t be so lucky a second time.

So she turned to face her nightmare, shielding Gregg behind her, and pointed the bat at Casey and demanded, “What do you want from me?”

**_“I will show you.”_ **

And just like that, something changed. It was the strangest and most horrible sensation Mae had ever experienced. One second, she was in control of her body – the next, she was trapped, like a helpless passenger behind her own eyes, as her muscles moved without her input. Before she knew what she was doing, she turned and punched Gregg in the jaw with a shocking strength. He crumpled to the stone floor in an instant, unconscious, and she straddled his waist and raised her baseball bat with both hands above her head.

_No! No no no, not again!_

The bat swung downward, hard, and connected with Gregg’s face with a sickening thud.

_NO! NO NO NO NOOOOOO!_

She couldn’t stop herself, couldn’t do anything but silently scream as the blunt weapon in her hands battered her best friend’s skull. Once, twice, three times. The sound of the impact echoed off the walls. There were shapes, little red circles and lines, all over the ground. All over Gregg’s head; and this, too, was just a shape – but a familiar, recognizable shape with a meaning attached to it, at least for now. A shape about to be broken, bashed into a pulpy red nothing, if her arms didn’t stop moving, if she couldn’t make herself _stop_ , oh God, oh God, stop, stop stop STOP, _I’M KILLING HIM_ _!_

And then she stopped, and dropped the bat and stood up, moving without her control. She dragged Gregg by the arms towards the cage, and inside it her gaze briefly fell on Bea, huddled in the corner with a look of wordless horror on her face. Oh lord, Bea, she was so sorry. She had hurt her, trapped her, was probably going to kill her in a moment. She was going to kill her friends with her own hands, and she wouldn’t be able to do a single thing to stop it.

She dropped Gregg by the door of the cage. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not; the force controlling her hadn’t bothered to check. From beneath a rock near the cage, she retrieved a small key. Then she walked over to where Angus lay and dragged him over to the cage as well. He was so much bigger and heavier than she was, but it was easy for her. She barely had to strain to move him; she had strength beyond what should have been possible.

When she had locked all her friends inside the cage and returned the key, her legs moved her back to stand in front of Casey, who had been watching unmoving as she worked. Finally, like a switch had been flipped, she dropped onto her knees, able to move her own body again.

Mae clutched at her temples, her eyes filling with tears. Her head felt like it had been split open with an ax. She leaned over on all fours and retched, wanting to vomit but unable to force anything out.

 ** _“I can make you forget, too,”_** the Black Goat said, watching her dispassionately. It threw the gun aside with a clatter, abandoning the pretense of needing a weapon to keep her in line. **_“It is like sleepwalking. When it is over, you remember nothing.”_**

Through heaving, retching breaths, Mae gasped, “My dreams…”

**_“Did you think your body remained asleep in bed while you wandered through that other realm? The spirit wanders while the body works.”_ **

She was getting her breathing back under control, second by second; just the act of controlling the pace of her own breath felt revelatory after being powerless to change it. But she remained on her knees, too weak to stand, and unable to bring herself to look at Casey’s possessed face. _Oh God, poor Casey. Is he asleep right now, or is it making him watch helplessly while it moves his body?_

“Is that…what you did with the others? The cult? You were controlling them?”

 ** _“No,”_** Black Goat said flatly. **_“I was weaker, then. Long imprisoned, down here in the dark. I merely whispered in their ears. Learned their secret fears and desires. They were meant to be my limbs, but they were weak, and they squabbled amongst themselves, and their efforts could not match my appetite. They kept me alive, ended my long hunger and brought me back to a shadow of my potential strength, but no more than that. That is why I had to savor my morsels. That is why this creature whose form I now speak through could be returned here. He had not yet been digested.”_**

 _Digested. Holy god._ Mae couldn’t think of anything to do, any way to fight back, that didn’t require hurting Casey, so she stalled for time and information by asking, “What changed? If you could take over someone’s body, why wait until now?”

Black Goat looked down at Casey’s hands, examining them idly, as if in thought. Then it strode past her and towards the entrance that led to the pit. **_“Follow. I will show you.”_**

It was not a request, but neither was it enforced. Her body was allowed to remain her own, and so she pushed herself up onto her trembling legs and walked through the short, narrow passageway to where Casey’s body stood at the edge of the cliff, waiting for her.

Black Goat pointed downward, into the dark void. **_“I am down there, in the depths of this world. I have been there for longer than you can comprehend. I cannot get out. But I can extend myself. I was not strong enough to do this before – only to whisper and sing and grant small powers. But then my worldly limbs failed me, and were trapped down in the dark with me, and so I whispered songs of merciful death and noble sacrifice and blessed reward. And then I gorged myself.”_**

“The cult,” Mae said in horror. “Your followers, they all…oh no, fuck, this is all my fault.”

 ** _“I am stronger now,”_** Black Goat explained. ** _“I have been feasting slowly, building my strength, until I could extend myself further than before. A piece of me is in this boy now, talking to you. A piece of me is in you, moving your limbs.”_**

“What do you mean, a piece of you? How is that possible? What did you do to me?”

Instead of answering, the creature reached out with Casey’s hand, fast as lightning, and seized her by the throat. In an instant, she was marched over to the wall by the edge of the pit and shoved against it, pinned in place by the hand around her neck as she kicked and thrashed. And then she froze, horrified, as Casey’s mouth pressed against hers, hard, kissing her while she screwed her eyes shut and tried to twist her head away.

She could feel the switchblade in her pocket pressing against her leg, and as loath as she was to harm Casey, she couldn’t endure this without fighting back. Her hand tried to sneak into her pocket, but then as suddenly as the assault had started, she was released, and she collapsed to the ground, coughing and sobbing. “Oh God, oh God…”

**_“You keep invoking that name, but it means nothing, and down here, less than nothing. You creatures, made of flesh and fluid, held together by bone and by faith. You are weak, and your vulnerable biology betrays you. So easily compromised. All it took was a kiss to let me in.”_ **

Mae could only cry, hating herself for displaying such weakness, but unable to dam up the opened floodgates. Through her sobs, she gasped, “Was any of it…real? Me and Casey…was it just…you the whole time?”

Black Goat watched her, leaning against the wall in a mockery of Casey’s relaxed, lanky stance. **_“The boy was an unknowing tool. His emotions were his own. His actions were his own, but they suited my needs. Through him, I could get close enough. That is what made him the perfect…”_** It paused, seeming to search for the proper words. **_“Delivery mechanism.”_**

“Why me?” Mae whimpered. “Why am I so special? What did I do to deserve this?”

**_“I saw into your head, little creature, that night when we first met. I know you see reality as it really is – abstract, random, chaotic. Meaningless, disposable shapes. I saw your mind and I knew I would be at home there. And I saw what I had to do to claim you. Your sorrow for the boy told me everything I needed to know. You and this vessel will be my left and right hands, and you will bring other little creatures to this place. We will start with your friends. I shall eat and eat, at greater pace and quantity than before, until I am strong enough to finally break free of this prison. And then I shall consume your world, and all the worlds beyond.”_ **

“Is that all you want?” Mae said, and suddenly she felt something besides horror and disgust and helplessness. She felt anger, hot and ferocious, filling her limbs with newfound strength, helping her stand. “Your only goal is to consume and consume, like your hunger is all that matters? Like you have the right to just hurt whoever is in your reach?”

**_“My goal is growth and survival. It is the same with all living things, all creatures with teeth and mouths. To grow, one must feed. To feed, weaker lifeforms must die and be consumed. It is the right of greater beings to feed on the lesser. Are we not alike in this most base of ways?”_ **

“You’re talking about eating the whole world!” Mae shouted. “I’m just one person, one thing, surviving, and yeah, I consume other things to do that, but I’m not greedy. You think I’m like you just because my brain is different than most people? We’re nothing alike! I’m not a monster. The world’s not meaningless to me. I do more than just destroy things, and I don’t have to use people like puppets just to survive. I have a life and a home and a family. I can love other people. There’s a point to me. What’s the point of _you_ , you pathetic old parasite?”

With a snarl, Casey’s hand shot out and grabbed her by the arm. **_“Insolent, insignificant little speck! The point of me is to exist, and it matters not at all if your world dies to sustain me. I am part of the fabric of this universe; I have existed since before it was born, and I will exist after it dies. When the Great Bell tolls and the Blind Ones find their way to this dimension at last, when they come to lay waste to everything that is, they will find nothing left. Nothing but me. For I will have consumed it all first, and grown stronger and more terrible than them, and then I will destroy the things from beyond and tear my way into their world and devour whatever I find there. I will_** **_be the last thing standing in all of creation if I must.”_**

Black Goat dragged her to the edge of the pit and held her above the void, dangling her by her arm. She screamed, kicking and scrabbling at the rock of the cliff edge, but her feet couldn’t reach solid ground.

**_“You are an irritant. Your anger, your will…perhaps I have misjudged you. Perhaps you are more trouble than you are worth. I could dispose of you here and now. Feed on you and take your strength and use it to inhabit your friends instead. Send them all out into the world to bring back more food for me. It would be faster. And they would not miss you. No one would miss you. You are worthless, broken, disposable. You do not deserve even the tiny, meaningless life you cling to. You do not deserve to be a vessel for so great a being as myself.”_ **

The thing looking through Casey’s eyes had its pitch-black gaze fixed on her, but she wasn’t listening as it spat hateful words in her face. As soon as it had become clear that Black Goat meant to kill her, her free hand had burrowed into the pocket of her jeans. She didn’t want to do this, but she didn’t want to die, either, and she was left with no other choice.

_Forgive me, Casey._

She pulled out the switchblade, flicked it open, and thrust it at Casey’s stomach.

His left hand caught her wrist at the last possible moment, just before the blade struck him. He pulled her closer to him, back onto the ledge, and twisted her arm behind her back, squeezing her wrist painfully until she was forced to let go of the knife. It dropped from her hand, bounced off the tip of the rock outcropping, and fell silently into the darkness.

 ** _“Hmm,”_** Black Goat said. **_“I did not think you had it in you to try and kill this body you love so much. Well done. But a futile effort.”_** It released her arms, and in the same quick motion, grabbed her by the neck. **_“I am going to eat you now. Any last words?”_**

“Yeah,” Mae gasped past the hand squeezing her neck. “I hope…you…choke on me.”

_Bea…Gregg…Angus…Casey…I’m sorry I couldn’t save you._

Black Goat released her with a push – just a little shove, far softer than it could have been, but enough for gravity to catch hold of her and do the rest. For a split-second as she began to fall, with nothing beneath her but a hungry, gaping black mouth, time seemed to stand still.

It should have pushed her harder. Maybe then she wouldn’t have had time, in that frozen split-second just as gravity began to drag her downward, to reach out and grab the collar of Casey’s shirt and give it a tug.

 **“No!”** Black Goat’s inhuman voice roared, but Mae could hardly hear it over the rush of air against her ears as together they fell, and fell, and fell, down into the endless black depths of the Earth.


	20. Monstrous Existence

Mae flung her eyes open and sat up with a sudden jolt and a gasp. It took her a moment to comprehend where she was – it was dark, and all she remembered was falling and falling until…what? She must have blacked out. Or maybe she was dead.

_Is this what being dead feels like?_

The surface beneath her was cool and soft and…unstable? It was coming apart in her hands, slipping through her fingers as she grasped blindly at the ground around her.

Sand. It was sand.

She knew where she was now. She had been disoriented at first, but now she could make out the shape of the dunes against the dark sky, and she saw that the glow of the eclipsed moon and the three stars of Tollmetron cast enough light to see by, if only barely. Everything around her was rolling dunes and flat expanses of plain, empty sand.

Everything except the small, person-sized heap of limbs lying on the ground some thirty feet away. She squinted at it, and then gasped. “Casey!”

She was on her feet in an instant, running towards him as best she could through the traction-less sand. It wasn’t until she was by his side that she remembered that Casey might not be Casey at all.

But then he stirred, as if on cue, and sat up with a distinctly human-sounding groan and opened his eyes. Even in the dim light, she could see that they were no longer that deep, empty shade of black.

“Mae?” he said, his voice sleepy and questioning, and all of a sudden she was reminded of how she’d felt when he first walked out of the dark and back into her life, on that Longest Night that felt like a lifetime ago now.

She couldn’t stop herself, despite everything that monster had done while wearing his face, from pulling him into a tight hug.

“Mae,” he said into her ear, hesitant and confused, “what’s going on? Where are we? This place, I-I’ve seen it before, I think. In my dreams, or…” Suddenly he pulled back, pushing her away from him and scrabbling backwards. There was a look of horror on his face, but it wasn’t directed at her; she saw an immense concern blended into his shocked expression. “Oh my god, Mae, I just remembered what happened. I saw it all, he made me watch everything. I hurt you. Oh God, I-I hurt our friends.”

“Hey,” she said, and she approached him and took his hands; he flinched, but she held them firmly together within her own. “Hey, no, it wasn’t you. It wasn’t your fault, you weren’t in control. You didn’t mean to do any of it.”

“But I _felt it_ ,” he insisted in a small, guilty voice, and his words stabbed at her heart, because she knew exactly what he meant. She could still feel the vibrations running through her hands from the force of the impact as she brought the baseball bat down on Gregg’s head, and fuck, she didn’t even know if Gregg was still alive. She’d hurt him so bad. If he was alive, he was probably dying in that cage with an injured Angus and a terrified Bea. And if Casey was here, and the Black Goat wasn’t, then that meant her friends were trapped and alone, where no one would ever find them.

She stood, pulling Casey up with her, and started practically dragging him along as she marched off in a random direction. “Come on, we’ve gotta go.”

“What? Go where, Mae? This place is endless!”

“I dunno, but we can’t stay here. That…thing will be looking for us, and we can’t be here when it comes back.”

 **“There is nowhere to go,”** a voice said, and she froze, panic rising inside her, before she recognized the dull, monotone purr in her mind. **“You are safer here. There is not an inch of this infinite place where the Black Goat fears to tread, except for wherever I am.”**

She turned and looked at the God Cat, sitting on the sand behind them with its paws curled up underneath it. As usual, it seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m really glad to see you,” Mae told it. “Thought you were someone else for a second there.”

**“When last we met, moments ago, I said you would be returning to this place.”**

“Guess you were right. Though I don’t think I’m dreaming this time…”

“Uh, Mae,” Casey said, his voice hushed and his eyes wide. “You know this…person?”

“Oh! Sorry, Casey. This is the weird cat who says they’re not God that visits me in my dreams sometimes. Or I guess I visit them. I dunno, it’s all kinda confusing. Which, by the way, Not-God Cat, I’m realizing now that I never asked…what’s your name?”

 **“This is not a useful question,”** the cat said.

“Oh. Okay. Um, why not?”

**“I have no name. There was never anyone to name me.”**

“You never had like, a mom? I got my name from my mom.” She shook herself and added, “Ugh, sorry. You’re right, not useful. Never mind. I’m having trouble focusing because I have been possessed and assaulted and I’m pretty sure murdered. All in like the last half hour.”

“Sorry again about all of that,” Casey said softly.

“Dude, it’s not your fault. Stop apologizing.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

“Dude! What did I just say?”

 **“If you are finished,”** the cat interrupted, **“Black Goat is soon coming for you. He is hungry, and he is wrathful, and moments from now he is finding you.”**

“Fuck,” Mae said. “Oh God. What do we do?”

**“You do nothing, little creature. I will speak with the beast.”**

“What _is_ he?” Casey asked. “The Black Goat. Where does he come from?”

 **“Those are not questions worth –”** the cat began to say.

“Oh, shut up and give us a straight answer,” Mae burst out. “Enough with the cagey bullshit already! Just answer his question. That’s the least you can do, after everything he’s been through.”

The cat gave what sounded in Mae’s head like the psychic equivalent of a sigh. **“Black Goat is an impulse playing itself out. An imbalance, selfish and hungry.”**

“You call that a straight answer?” Mae complained.

**“It is the best answer I have. Now hush, little creature. I sense him drawing near.”**

And sure enough, even as he said it, Mae could feel it too: The throbbing in her skull, and the chorus of indistinct, whispering voices in her head. Their song sounded angry and urgent, like the buzz of a swarm of agitated wasps.

“Guhhhh,” she moaned, doubling over and clutching her head. Casey put his arm around her shoulders cautiously, and she glanced up and asked, “Can you feel that, too?”

“Yeah,” he said, and she noticed that while he hadn’t cried out, his face was screwed up with pain. “Feels like someone put a beehive in my skull and then cracked it open and let all the bees loose.”

Mae clutched him and gasped, pointing up at the dark sky. “Look!”

It was difficult to see at first; a black shape moving against a black sky. Had there still been stars in that sky, it would have blotted them out, but as it was, it was practically invisible, and so they didn’t see it until it was almost upon them.

The shape settled on the dunes facing the cat, and here, juxtaposed against the soft glow of the sand, Mae could make out its shadowy form: four hooved legs, a long body and neck, a head with great curved horns and eyes that glowed like embers in a fireplace.

 ** _“I should have known you would be here,”_** the Black Goat said, addressing the cat. Mae could still understand it, even without it speaking through Casey’s mouth, though whether this was because of the otherworldly place they were in or because it had contaminated her with a piece of itself, she couldn’t say.

The cat unfurled its paws from underneath it and stretched. It looked larger standing up – more intimidating, although the Goat still towered over it. **“It has been a long time, even by our standards.”**

**_“Not long enough. Stand aside now. You have no business here, and these little creatures are mine.”_ **

“No!” Casey yelled suddenly, stepping forward. Mae tried to reach for him and pull him back, but he thrust his arm out in front of her, shielding her from the giant shadow animals that loomed above them. “I won’t let you hurt me or Mae again!”

The Goat laughed, and if that sound had been terrible coming out of Casey’s mouth, it was a hundred times worse bubbling up from the creature’s own throat. The ground shook with the rumble of its laughter, and for a moment, the moon’s light dimmed, the way the sun dims when a cloud passes over it. **_“You cannot stop me, tiny thing.”_**

 **“But I can,”** the cat said, and its voice was so calm and matter of fact that Mae had no doubt it spoke the truth. A sudden flare of hope shot up through her insides, bursting inside her heart like a firecracker.

But the Goat only laughed again and said, **_“You won’t. Little creatures, if you are placing your hope in this old fool to save you, you will be disappointed. They have done nothing for eons but sit and watch the world. They know what fate is coming for them, for all of us, and yet take no action to prevent it, because to do so would upset their precious natural order. They are nothing but a passive, toothless relic of a bygone age, waiting to die.”_**

**“You did not find me so toothless when I caged you in your hole and prevented you from freely walking the Earth.”**

**_“That was eons ago,”_** Black Goat spat. **_“Time has softened you since then. Made you weak. You know why I must do what I do. You know about the things beyond. Tollmetron hangs in the sky above us even now, and still you do nothing! When the Blind Ones come to unmake reality, you will simply lay down your life, but I will fight, and I will win, and I will survive.”_**

 **“No,”** the cat said, unperturbed. **“You will rage, and I will rest, and we will see who meets the better end.”**

The vast goat lowed its head and kicked the sand with its hoof, its eyes blazing with red fire. **_“Maybe I should bring about a quicker ending for you. It would be a mercy.”_**

 **“Your threats are empty. You know you can no sooner harm me than strike at your own shadow. Nor I you. We are bound together; such has it always been, and such will it always be.”** The cat gave another soft mental sigh, a rare crack in its emotionless mask. **“However much we may both prefer it to be otherwise.”**

**_“Enough. I tire of your prattle. I say again: Stand aside and let me claim my prey.”_ **

A growling hiss rose up from the cat’s throat, low but threatening. It was all the more shocking for being the first time Mae had heard the creature express any form of anger. **“You think I will not stop you? I have allowed you your games in the past, but now that I grasp the shape of your intentions, I cannot indulge you any longer. Your schemes would hasten the end of everything, and that is unallowable. You have never understood that you cannot simply reschedule reality to suit your whims. When this universe is wiped clean to make way for the next one, it will be at the intended time, and not by your hand. Now go. Leave these creatures behind and return to your hole.”**

 ** _“You would dismiss me so lightly?”_ **the Goat bellowed in fury. **_“Time is short! I can tolerate no delays. If I do not act now, if I do not build my strength, then it will be too late!”_**

 **“Yes,”** the cat agreed. **“Time is so very short. I suggest you use what little of it remains to make peace with your own limitations. Now begone, before I am forced to repeat myself.”**

The Black Goat reared up on its hind legs and gave a horrible bleating scream of rage. For a moment, Mae thought it was going to strike at the cat with its hooves, but instead, it pushed off from the sand with its back feet and climbed into the sky, its shadowy form growing smaller and smaller until it melted into the night and disappeared.

Long seconds ticked by as Mae held her breath, until finally she exhaled and said, “Is…is it over?”

 **“He is gone,”** the cat said. **“He will not be bothering you again.”**

“Wow,” Casey exhaled; he had been holding his breath too, Mae realized. “That was tense. Thank you for standing up to him like that.”

**“Do not thank me yet, little creature. There remains the question of what to do with you.”**

“What…what do you mean?” Mae asked.

 **“Creatures who end up here are not usually returning. Except,”** it added, nodding at Casey, **“for this one, but that was by the Black Goat’s design.”**

“If Black Goat can send Casey back to our world from here, can’t you do the same?”

**“Hmm. Perhaps. I have never attempted such a thing, but…there are many things within my power that I have not done.”**

“So it _is_ within your power, then?” Casey questioned.

**“I believe so.”**

“Please, you have to send us back,” Mae pleaded. “My friends are back there. I abandoned them, and they need me. They won’t survive unless I save them!”

**“They will not survive long anyways, little creature. The time of ending is soon upon us.”**

“What does ‘soon’ mean to you?” she questioned. “Is it days? Weeks? A few years?”

**“No. Longer than that, by the measure of your time-keeping.”**

“Then it doesn’t matter! We’ll take whatever time we have left! That’s what the Black Goat didn’t understand – it’s not about living forever, it’s about making the most of our short lives. Give us the chance to do that. I know our lives must seem brief and insignificant to you, but please, let us have the existence we were supposed to, me and Casey both.”

**“I could undo your fates and return you to the living world. But it would be most…irregular.”**

“No,” Casey said. “What was irregular was what Black Goat did to us. This would just be putting things back the way they were before he meddled. That’s your whole thing, right? Keeping everything in the proper order?”

The cat paused, its big glowing eyes unblinking, as it considered this. **“There is…some merit to what you say.”**

“Wait,” Mae interrupted. “Black Goat could still control us. He put something in us, a piece of him. Can you remove that? Cure us, and then send us back?”

**“You know not what you ask, little creature. There is only one way to do this: You must die and be remade.”**

“Oh,” Mae said softly. “Well…Casey’s already been died and remade once, right? And he turned out okay. How bad could it be?”

**“You will die and live again, but one day moments from now you will die a second time, and your fate may not be the same as that of the regular dead. Are you certain you do not wish instead to proceed on, now, to what lies beyond death?”**

Mae inhaled sharply, her eyes wide. “You mean…there’s really life after death?”

**“I cannot say. I have not yet died.”**

“Oh. Well then yeah, no, I think we’ll take our chances with the real world.” She glanced at Casey. “Right?”

“Yeah, that sounds preferable to me.” He met her eyes and smiled gently. “An uncertain fate after death versus the certainty of a life with you? No contest.”

Mae swallowed past the sudden lump in her throat. “You…you still want to be with me? After everything that’s happened?”

A look of doubt flickered across Casey’s face. “I mean…if that’s okay? If that’s still what you want?”

She reflexively touched her neck, still sore from where Casey’s hand had squeezed it. But that was when his face had black eyes and was lined with hatred, and his eyes now were green, his face filled only with kindness and concern. Forgiveness should not have come easily, and yet, in that moment, she found that she had no choice but to forgive Casey Hartley for his unwitting role in her worst nightmare. She was ready to wake up now, and she wanted him there beside her when she did.

So she reached out and took his hand and said, “Yeah. Yeah, it is.” Then she turned to the cat and said, “Okay. Do…whatever it is you have to do.”

 **“Lie down on the sand,”** the cat instructed.

They obeyed, laying down on their backs, side by side. The cat reached out and placed a great paw on top of Mae’s chest, and then another atop Casey’s. Slowly, it extended claws from its paws – sharp claws, one of them pricking Mae’s chest directly above her heart.

“Wait,” she said abruptly. “How do we know this will work? How do I know it won’t just kill us?”

**“You don’t.”**

“Oh.”

**“I will make it as quick for you as I can.”**

She turned her head to look at Casey beside her and reached down and took his hand. “I love you, Casey.”

“I love you too, Mae.”

She closed her eyes.

The cat pushed down, and a claw pierced her heart, and she screamed.

But only for a moment.

**\----**

For the second time that day, Mae awoke with a gasp and a jolt. She blinked and turned her head, looking wildly around. She was in the cavern again, where she’d started; her discarded flashlight still cast a beam across the room.

Casey was on the ground beside her, and she hurried to him and shook his shoulder until he stirred and opened his eyes. “Did – did we make it?”

Before she could answer, a voice croaked, “…Mae? …Casey?”

“Bea!” She scrambled to pick up the flashlight and rushed over to the cage, almost stumbling over her feet in her hurry. Through the boards, she could see her friends; Bea was looking at her with worry and confusion and fear; Angus had his shirt off, and it was balled up in his hands and soaked with blood; and Gregg lay between them, his face swollen and bloody.

“Mae, where did you go?” Bea said weakly. She pointed at Casey, who was hanging back and watching guiltily. “Is…is he still…?”

“No,” Mae said, shaking her head. “He’s himself again. It’s over, Bea, and I am so, so sorry that all this happened, but it’s over now and we’re going to get everyone out of here.” She looked at Gregg. “Is he…how is he?”

“He’s alive,” Angus said. “But he needs medical attention.” His voice was slow and slurred.

“Are _you_ okay?”

“Bit…concussed, I think.”

“Geez, okay. Hang on, I gotta find the key.”

She retrieved the key from its hiding place under the rock and unlocked the cage, and slowly, carefully, they stumbled out and stood up. Angus carried Gregg in his arms, wobbling slightly.

“God,” Mae said, “I just want to hug you all and never let you go, but I’m afraid you’d disintegrate in my arms or something.”

“Hospital first,” Angus said practically, “hugs after.”

“You guys,” Casey said. He was staring at the ground, looking ashamed. “I’m so sorry for what I did to you. Mae, too. It wasn’t us, it was that…that thing, using us. But it’s gone now, it’s not going to happen again. I would never hurt any of you, you know that, ri-”

“Shut up,” Bea said hoarsely. “Apologize once we’re all safe. Apologize if Gregg pulls through. Until then, it doesn’t mean shit.”

“Bea,” Mae started to say, reaching for her friend, but Bea slapped her hand away.

“That goes for you too, Mae.”

Mae wanted to cry, but she pulled herself together. Bea was right. They weren’t out of the woods yet. “Okay. You don’t have to trust me forever, Bea. Just trust me long enough to lead us all out of here.”

And so together, Angus carrying Gregg, they set off back down the stone passageway and back to the long flight of stairs.

As her friends pushed past her and began the gradual ascent, moving slowly and carefully, Mae paused and glanced back the way they had come. Faintly, down the hall, she could see the red glow of the lantern by the edge of Black Goat’s hole, but she couldn’t hear the singing in her head anymore. She knew it was still down there, somewhere, but its voice had gone quiet. She took that to be a good sign.

 _I’ll bury you,_ she promised. _I’ll get some dynamite from Germ and I’ll come back and blow a hole in these stairs. I’ll make sure no one can ever walk into your waiting mouth again. The world may be ending one day, but until then, you can just starve._

She spat on the floor, turned her back on the horror behind her, and limped slowly up out of the dark, Casey’s hand in hers.


	21. Anywhere Else

“I can’t believe your families are letting you leave.”

The Possum Springs bus station was almost empty aside from the five of them; not many people were catching a bus out of town this early on a Monday morning. Possum Springs wasn’t a place people frequently came and went from.

“We kinda just told them the part where we’re visiting Gregg’s cousin Jen in Bright Harbor,” Mae said.

“Which is true,” Gregg interjected.

“But we may have left out the part where –”

“Where you’re not planning on coming back,” Bea finished.

Mae was having trouble meeting her eyes. “Yeah…”

“I mean, Gregg and I are coming back,” Angus said. “We’ll be around for a bit. Although if this apartment showing goes well and we like the look of it…well, who knows?”

“Guys, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,” Mae said seriously. “You need to get. Out. Of this town. I don’t care if you have to steal all the money in the Snack Falcon cash register and go on the run, just get that apartment in Bright Harbor and don’t look back.”

“Mae,” Angus said, “I don’t know how much money you think is in the Snack Falcon cash register on any given day, but…”

“Don’t need to steal,” Gregg said proudly. “I think we’ve finally got enough to get our feet under us. Although that would be a hilarious way to end my long and storied Snack Falcon career.”

“You’re lucky your family covered your hospital bills,” Bea said, “or you wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon.”

“Yeah. Guess family is actually good for something now and then,” Gregg said. “Mae, don’t think I don’t see you looking guilty over there. I’m okay! I can see out of this eye again now! Seriously, I’m practically good as new.”

He wasn’t. The swelling on his eye had gone down, true, and you could look at him without drawing in a sharp breath through your teeth now, but his nose would never look quite the same again after being broken. And that was the least of it: He had a scar on his head and a metal plate on his skull where the doctors had removed the damaged bone. He’d been in surgery for what had felt like a lifetime. He had, they had informed him, been lucky to live.

She could still hear the crunch of his bones under her bat, every time she lay in bed at night trying and failing to sleep.

Maybe Casey could see distress on her face, because he butted into the conversation with a well-timed change of subject. “Bea, you’re going to deliver those letters to me and Mae’s parents when we said to, right?”

“I said I would, didn’t I?” Bea said. “What am I supposed to tell them when they freak out on me though, Mae?”

“Tell them what’s in the letter. I tried to explain everything I could. Everything that won’t make me sound crazy.”

“When you take out all those bits, there’s not much left,” Bea said.

“Yeah, but…if I tried to tell them in person, I wouldn’t be able to handle it. And anyway, the parts I’m going to tell them should be believable enough. They know about my, y’know, my issues. They know it’s been getting worse.”

“You’re still having episodes? The…the depersonalization thing?”

“You have no idea, Bea. It’s every day now. Practically the only time it’s not happening is when I’m around you guys. It’s ironic – I came back here because this used to be the only place where everything _wasn’t_ just shapes, but these past few weeks, it’s like…I dunno. I just can’t look at this town the same way anymore. It’s been poisoned for me, I think. Maybe it’s a side effect of whatever…that thing did to me.”

“And you’re sure that’s cured?” Bea asked.

“Yeah. The God Cat, or whatever you want to call them, said they would fix it. And all my dreams since then have just been normal, garden-variety nightmares, so…”

“How do you know this creature from your dreams was telling you the truth?” Bea asked. “It’s not that I don’t believe you about all of that,” she added quickly, “it’s just…I can’t be the only one thinking that, right?”

Casey shook his head. “No, but Bea, you didn’t meet that cat. It has a way of saying stuff that makes you believe it.”

“Yeah,” Mae agreed. “I don’t think it would see any point in lying.”

But Bea still looked dubious. “I just don’t like the thought of you out there somewhere on your own.”

“I won’t be on my own. I’ll be with Casey. We’re resourceful. We’ll figure something out. Make our own way.”

“That’s not exactly a plan, Mae.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say. I just know I can’t stay here. At least out there, wherever we end up, we’ll have a chance.”

“I know some folks,” Casey added. “Folks from school who live in BH now. A couple family friends. I know places we can crash.” He laughed and added, “Assuming Jen is cold enough to kick us out eventually.”

“I’ll bribe her to let you stay if I have to,” Gregg said. “Just ‘til you get jobs and pull in some money and can get your own place.”

“But rent in Bright Harbor’s so expensive,” Bea said.

“We will rent rooms in people’s closets with under the table cash if we have to, Bea,” Casey said firmly. “Like I said, we’ll make it work. You don’t have to worry so much.”

But Mae could see that there was more than just friendly concern behind Bea’s hesitation. She stood and pulled Bea up from her seat. “Beatrice, buddy, best pal I’ve ever had…”

“Dude,” Gregg interjected.

“Okay, okay, it’s a tie. Don’t make me choose!” She steered Bea toward the door. “Let’s get some fresh air.”

As soon as they were outside, Bea pulled away and said, “I hate this. All of it.”

“You know,” Mae said, “it’s kind of nice that you still want me around, even after everything.”

“Of course I want you around, you idiot,” Bea huffed, hugging her chest. “You’re my best friend. Even if you did get like, possessed by a demon or whatever for a minute there.”

“Bea, I don’t want to leave you, either…”

“Yeah, sure. But you’re still going to. You and Casey are gonna run off together, and Gregg and Angus, and I’ll still be here. Still trapped, just…alone now.”

Mae didn’t know what to say. “We’ll still talk. Whenever we have wi-fi, I’ll text you. And hey, you never know. Maybe it won’t work out. Maybe I’ll just end up coming back here again.”

“God, I hope not.”

Mae frowned. “I thought you wanted me to stay.”

“I said I wanted you around, not that I wanted you to be trapped here too.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

They stood in silence for a while, Bea leaning against the bus station wall, and then she added, “Just promise me one thing.”

Mae looked up at her. “What?”

“If you go out there, and you find somewhere better than this craphole town, and you make a life there, a real, good life that you can call your own…just leave a little space in it. Leave a Bea-sized space in a corner somewhere, so maybe someday, if I get the kind of chance you’ve got right now, I can come and fit myself right in and it’ll be like I was always there.”

Mae hugged her. “There will always be space for you in my life, Bea. Promise.”

They held the hug for a long moment, only separating when the bus pulled up to the curb. A second later, the boys came out the door to meet them, Casey lugging Mae’s backpack that she’d left inside. It was one of the big ones, a camping backpack that was almost taller than she was, and she’d stuffed it full of practically all the clothes she owned.

“Thanks,” she said as she took it from him and slung it onto her back. “Ugh, if this thing was any heavier, I wouldn’t be able to carry it.”

“Let me know if you want to swap,” Casey said. “Mine’s lighter.”

“What, you didn’t try to pack all your worldly possessions?”

He shrugged. “I don’t need a lot.”

“Just me, right?” she said teasingly.

“Just you,” he grinned. “And, y’know, some clothes and shit. Maybe a toothbrush.”

“That maybe better be a definitely,” Mae scowled. “Don’t expect any kisses if your breath stinks!”

“Why don’t you be the judge of that?” Casey smirked, and he leaned down, and she stood on her tiptoes and their lips met.

His breath, she decided, was just fine.

“Okay, lovebugs,” Gregg interrupted cheerily, “break it up. All afuckingboard!”

As the others pushed ahead to check their luggage and have their tickets scanned, Mae lingered for one last look at Bea.

“Bea…” she started to say, but Bea shook her head.

“Go, Mae. Don’t draw it out.”

“Love you, Beebee.”

Bea smiled sadly and dabbed briefly at her eye. “Love you, too, Mayday.”

And then she turned away, and Mae went to get on the bus, and by the time they sat down and she looked back out the window, Bea was gone.

Gregg and Angus sat in the row in front of them, Gregg chattering away to whoever was listening about how cool Bright Harbor was and how much they were going to love it there. But Mae’s attention was on the window, as the bus pulled out of the station and down the road, leaving the familiar, well-worn shapes of her haunted home behind her.

A line from the annual Harfest play surfaced unbidden from somewhere in her memories. _And once haunted, can a place be unhaunted?_

She didn’t think it could. But she wasn’t a place, and she was going to unhaunt herself if it took her whole life to figure out how to do so.

Casey’s hand on her leg pulled her from her reverie, and she turned her gaze from the window to look at the boy beside her. “You with me, Mae?”

“Always. Anywhere.”

“Hmm,” he smiled. “An-y-where…”

“Just…not…here,” she finished, matching the rhythm. “I ever tell you you’re a fucking great songwriter?”

“Maybe I’ll write a song about you someday.”

“Oh geez,” she said, blushing. “Please don’t. I would die. Literally on the spot.”

“Well, you’ve died before,” Casey teased.

She curled up with her back against him, his arms around her. “I’d like to not do that again for like, a really long time.”

“Don’t worry,” Casey said. “You and me have got a whole long life ahead of us. Plenty of time.”

She craned her head back and parted her lips, and he leaned down and kissed her, and yes, here in this moment, she could make herself believe that that was true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's play them off with a song, shall we?
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVws52PPvEA


	22. Epilogue: Before All is Forgotten

**This story is not over.**

**It has an ending, and that ending is coming for everything, and it is moments away, and it is happening now.**

**The world you know will end, and all the others, too, and then there will be no worlds, and then there will be new worlds, but not for a long time.**

**Everything is always ending, little creature, including you. Today you are living, and the next day you will still be living, and again and again and again until you stop. And when you stop, you will turn to bone and then to dust, and you will not come back. The next time your story ends will be the last time, and you will not be remembered for more than a moment. Except, perhaps, by me.**

**But that end is not today. It is coming, but it is not today. Today, little creature, you are living. And you are remembering.**

**And you are remembered.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, so much, to everyone who has stuck with this fic long enough to be reading this. This was my longest fic to date - about half the length of the last novel I wrote - and I hope I gave my fellow NITW fans a memorable, moving, and entertaining story to follow and look forward to during these fraught, unstable times we live in.
> 
> Keep living, loving and writing, folks. Until next time! <3


End file.
